Our principles
These are not policies. Policies can change. These are descriptions of what Long Play is - the decisions baked into how the platform is built, not promises that depend on good intentions.
On creators
Your work is yours.
We host it. We look after it. We never claim any rights to it, and we will never use it to train AI.
You control what happens to it.
Who sees it, when it goes live, when it comes down. Long Play is infrastructure for your decisions, not a gatekeeper making them for you.
Your original files are always available.
Download them any time, in original quality, with your original filename. If you leave Long Play, you leave with everything you brought.
On money
Long Play makes money from subscriptions, not from your audience.
Creators pay for the platform. That aligns us with you, not with advertisers.
Ad Manager is a tool for creators, not a revenue stream for Long Play.
We don’t see your deals. We don’t touch your money. We don’t take a cut. Ever.
Long Play will never sell advertising.
No advertiser portal. No ad network. No sponsored placements. No programmatic anything.
Long Play will never broker sponsor deals.
If a brand wants to work with a creator on Long Play, they talk to the creator. Long Play is not in that conversation.
Long Play will never take a percentage of creator earnings.
Not now, not later, not under any plan tier.
On the viewing experience
Long Play will never run mid-rolls.
One pre-roll, one post-roll, creator-assigned, creator-controlled. That is the permanent limit.
Ads are optional and creator-controlled.
Ad Manager is opt-in. Creators choose whether to use it, which ads to run, and when. Long Play plays the ad. That is the full extent of our involvement.
We will never insert an ad the creator didn’t choose.
Not for any reason. Not for revenue. Not for “platform sustainability.” Never.
On your data
We record what we need to run the platform.
Play counts, upload activity, account information. Nothing more.
We don’t sell your data.
To anyone, for any reason, ever.
We don’t profile your viewers.
Ad Manager reports show aggregate play counts. No demographics, no geographic breakdown, no individual viewer identification. That data does not exist on Long Play because we do not collect it.
Play data belongs to the creator.
Data recorded in Ad Manager is used only to generate creator reports. Long Play does not use it for platform analytics, advertising, or any other purpose.
On the long term
We know you’ve heard this before.
YouTube was creator-friendly once. Vimeo was indie-friendly once. Platforms drift when their incentives drift - when advertisers matter more than creators, when growth matters more than craft.
Long Play’s incentives don’t work that way. We make money when creators find the platform worth paying for. Ad Manager takes no cut. There’s no advertiser relationship pulling us in a different direction. The architecture makes drift genuinely unattractive, not just against our values.
Creators and the platform. That’s what guides every decision we make - not advertisers, not growth targets.
So if you support Long Play, Long Play will support you. That’s not a promise about things we can’t control. It’s a description of how this is built.
The short version
We built Long Play because we wanted a platform that respects the work. Everything else follows from that.
Permanence Pledge
This is not marketing language. These are commitments we intend to be publicly held to.
Who runs this
Long Play is built and run by one person, with 23 years in broadcast production, based in Australia. There's no support queue routing you to whoever's rostered on today. If you get in touch, you're hearing from the person who built the platform.
That's a real tradeoff, and this page won't pretend otherwise. A large company can promise round-the-clock coverage across time zones; one person can't. What it can promise instead: every message gets read by a real person, every copyright notice gets handled personally, and no decision about your content is made by an algorithm optimising for advertiser comfort - because there is no algorithm and there are no advertisers to keep comfortable.
See what's shipped recently for a sense of the pace. This is actively built and maintained, not left running on autopilot.
Built to grow - deliberately, not wastefully
Long Play runs on infrastructure sized for where the platform is today, not padded out for traffic that hasn't arrived yet. That's a budget decision, not a ceiling - the hosting is built on infrastructure that can be scaled up as real usage grows, without needing a rebuild first.
In the meantime, the focus is on using what we have well: automated monitoring that watches the platform's health continuously, efficient caching so pages and images stay fast without over-provisioning hardware for it, and fixing the underlying cause of a problem rather than just throwing more server at it. Growth here means growing sensibly - reliability first, scale when the numbers say it's actually needed.
What we will never do
- Remove, suppress, demonetize, or downrank your content for advertiser-friendliness, brand safety, or commercial reasons
- Insert ads into your videos without your explicit choice and setup
- Algorithmically penalise your content for low engagement, unfashionable subject matter, or topics that make advertisers uncomfortable
- Claim ownership of your content or use it for purposes beyond hosting and streaming it for you
- Require exclusivity - your work can live here and anywhere else simultaneously
What we will always do
- Store your original file byte-exact, exactly as you uploaded it, for as long as your account is active
- Let you download your original file at any time, no questions asked
- Give you at least 90 days advance notice before any significant change to platform policy that affects how your content is distributed or accessed
- If Long Play is ever acquired, merged into another entity, or shuts down entirely, give you at least 90 days' notice and a one-click export of every original file before any material change takes effect
Why this is credible
Long Play’s only revenue is subscriptions. We have no advertising revenue to protect, no investor mandates to chase engagement, and no incentive to serve advertisers over creators. That structural difference is what makes these commitments possible.
Creators who were here when this pledge was first published are on record. We intend this as a document we can be publicly held to, not a clause buried in terms of service.
What this does not cover
- Platform Rules violations. We retain the right to remove illegal content, content that endangers real people, or material that violates applicable law.
- Technical failures and force majeure. We commit to best-effort preservation, not a guarantee against hardware failure or events entirely outside our control. We back up your originals and take redundancy seriously, but no infrastructure is infallible.
- Accounts in arrears. Accounts significantly overdue may lose access to features. We will always provide a reasonable grace period and the ability to download your originals before any restriction takes effect.