Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor? Apart from network effect, and Google's Ad Monopoly, what does YT have that has made it a clear winner in this field? What would a competitor need to take on them? |
Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor? Apart from network effect, and Google's Ad Monopoly, what does YT have that has made it a clear winner in this field? What would a competitor need to take on them? |
Does anyone on HN actually still have YouTube videos playable on their machines?
Why? Text is so much faster to learn from and without sound and video baggage that gets added.
I understand people raised on MTV and Snapchat caring about video for fun and not caring about the wasted time. But isn't this a community focused on productivity and knowledge? YouTube is the opposite of that. Might as well watch sports or hanging out in bars. ;)
But I have learned a ton of woodworking techniques from watching build videos. There are a ton of little techniques along the way that are innate to people who have been in the industry for years and thus wouldn't be in written instructions, but I can see them and pick them up from a video. It's really hard to describe the technique for some of the resin work out there too, like getting realistic looking waterlines.
Or when I'm stuck at a certain point in a game it's a lot easier to see a video of someone doing it than read a half-assed description.
Content creators want to go where the users are.
The law says the opposite, this is what Section 230 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is about. The platform is responsible for acting upon takedown requests from copyright holders. Everything YouTube negotiated with major copyright holders is extralegal.
When I started selling the first products I designed and manufactured --decades ago-- I absolutely sucked at it. I was selling like an engineer thinks. Which means I was a horrible sales person. It wasn't until one of my friends, who happened to be one of my resellers, took me under his wing and taught me sales that I understood the process. It took somewhere around six to eight months for me to "see the light". Towards the end I could sell our products almost without saying a word about them. You are dealing with people, not robots. Everything you care about as an engineer is usually of no interest whatsoever to the buyer (that can be the case even for highly technical products).
I think the answer is far simpler than the obvious go-to's in this case (established, network, google, infrastructure, technical blah, blah, etc.). Sure, those are factors, but this is about sales and sales is about psychology.
Simple question:
What would it take to sell anyone on Y and have them stop stop using X?
Let's say X is a brand of forks and knives and Y is a different brand. Furthermore, assume they are free. Cost of the switch is exactly $0. Effort is also zero. You say "I want to switch to Y" and they magically appear in your kitchen and replace X. As easy as can be.
Well, Y has to give you a reason strong enough to compel you to make the change. Call it value, if you will. The mythical "differentiation" with, perhaps, more attached to it than just being different.
A few weeks ago I saw metal cutlery that was black. It looked beautiful. Same stainless steel material usually used for cutlery everyone if familiar with. Except, in this case, it was blackened, likely using a chemical process. If that was Y, it could inspire some to make the switch, just to be different. Maybe. More likely than that, they'll get Y and keep using X.
Put a different way, if X works well and does everything you want it to do, there are very few reasons to change to Y. The company behind X might have to do something horrible to suddenly inspire mass exodus.
I believe this is the case with YouTube/Google. What they do, they do well. The user experience is excellent. Yes, we all know about the ridiculous no-customer-service account suspensions where you lose all of your Google app access, etc. However, this is not the average user experience. In fact, I would venture to say that this is well outside two standard deviations from the mean, ridiculously outside of that. The area under the curve is deeply dominated by users who are satisfied to the extent that the thought of going elsewhere never really crosses their minds. When a user/customer/client can't be compelled to even think about Y when using X, the probability of them considering a switch is as close to zero as can be.
The only way for someone to mount a solid effort against YouTube falls under two areas:
A- By force. Spend billions advertising and educating the audience and, over time, if the product is good and the message is solid, N% of YouTube users would migrate. This would require so much money it would easily meet the definition of insanity. The cost of acquisition isn't likely to ever justify the investment.
B- Cater to a deeply motivated audience to carve out a much smaller percentage of YouTube's audience. The most obvious audience I can identify in this moment in history is Trump's audience. Regardless of what the reader might thing of them, they have grievances with social media and YouTube that could be addressed by an alternative platform. The cost of acquisition, in this case, would be relatively low. In fact, I would not be surprised if most of the investment went into creating a solid infrastructure with only a modest marketing push to trigger network effects.
Other than option B --which would only capture an audience in the tens of millions, and possibly grow it to >100million over time--- I can't see anything that would inspire people to leave YouTube behind. And, even with B, the same audience would continue to use YouTube, because, well, everything is already there and the user experience is good. B takes advantage of deep motivation for change. Without that, it simply isn't going to happen.
To wit: https://www.offcenterharbor.com
I quite like Odysee and use it a lot.
Googles also has an ad network that finances the product's development and on going maintenance. So a competitor would have to compete against both giants to at least get a foothold.
At this point, the only way to get competitors against YouTube is for the government to get involved and help the new companies in some way.
One possible competitor is for a confederation of organizations to get together and produce a product. They would have to have a product that's at least as good and be willing to accept losses for a time. Also they have to stay together and act together as a force of one. It's unlikely to happen.
I would say that a competitor would have to start by building an ad network first so that there's some money to finance a YouTube like product.
The true competition is the one for people's attention. Find a product that can best get people's attention and you have chance to succeed against Google and YouTube.
Youtube is good for large videos, gfycat is good for short ones, but honestly, I would really favor video platforms who offer direct access to the file. And since it's pretty common knowledge that videos need to be short to get views (free content, short attention span), hosting longer videos is more appropriate for platforms like netflix (entertainment, paid).
Youtube is dominating because it existed prior to html5 videos, since it used flash.
Now, h264 is everywhere and easily accessible. Online, ubiquitous videos don't require 4K, that's mostly for entertainment. 4K is okay for short videos maybe.
Youtube is really awful in many many ways, it has become so big it's acting like a news channel (removing content etc). It has become too big to fail, while I'm pretty sure there are terabytes of video that are almost never watched. When you compartmentalize the types of youtube videos, its competitors are spotify for music, netflix for youtube red, gfycat and cousins for shorts, etc. Platforms like patreon are much better suited to support creators.
Not to mention the ecological impact of such a large platform.
The easy monetization capability is unrivaled, this is a big reason people that make videos choose YouTube. This is where their network effects come from. People don't really choose where to watch videos, people choose where to upload them though.
But as far as a viewer is concerned, do you care what video host a video is on before you watch it? Probably not. You'll click a vimeo or dailymotion or whatever link if the video you want to watch is on one of those sites. YouTube by and large is not a social platform, so it's network effects are very limited.
IMO the reasons YouTube has basically a monopoly is they have what amounts to embedded google search that only searches their site, and their app comes preinstalled on almost all mobile phones. Think about it, as a user, you want to search for a video, you click the video searching app on your phone, oh it only searches YouTube? Oh well, the video is probably on YouTube anyway.
Because network effects let them pay creators more, so of course creators tend to stick around.
Because people default to searching on Youtube for videos, and Youtube Search only searches Youtube, rather than being like Google Video Search.
> What would a competitor need to take on them?
A shitload of VC cash to burn on both data transfer / CDN buildout and paying prominent YouTubers way more than they're making you in exchange for exclusive videos (time limited would probably be fine, e.g. 1 year exclusivity). Also, maybe, integrate something like Patreon directly.
One of the greatest achievements of YouTube is basically serving countless audiences and numerous use-cases under the guise of a single service.
You'd need to roll-up WhatsApp video sharing, Vimeo, Facebook Watch/Tik Tok/IG Reels, MTV, and then throw the aspirational element of creator payments over the top of it. I'd question whether anyone would actually want to do all of that.
IMO what YouTube alternatives should focus on is being unique and different from YouTube in someway -- at least initially. Maybe focus on short-form video and build algorithms and moderation tools that ensure users are only served extremely high quality videos. Perhaps a video service providing something like a daily digest of the best daily / weekly videos that match your preferences could work.
As the platform grows it could then increase the allowed video length and expand into a more general video hosting service like YouTube. We see this trend in social media all the time, Facebook has a lot of competitors, but non of them are competing directly with Facebook. They're all doing something a little different and a little better than Facebook.
If you would like to speed up the process refuse to login, support independent content producers and creators, and give search engines a reason to promote other platforms (don't click, simple as that)
edit: Tilvids.com is a good example of the power of peertube
YouTube is a clear winner in a few big categories, but video is a huge market and they haven’t gotten an edge on anything new in awhile, for example short form.
The other contenders don’t have the various resources or would do it “wrong enough” it wouldn’t matter.
And maybe it's just me but music videos don't have the same traction that they used to have. There are so many chart toppers that I've listened to often for which I hadn't watched the video for a very long time.
Compare this to 2011 where we discovered songs, including Gangnam style, on YouTube charts.
But I'd definitely not discount it entirely simply because not everyone has access or can afford to pay for the music apps, particularly in developing countries.
I would argue that both TikTok and Netflix are very successful YouTube competitors.
I don't know why people believe YouTube is a loss maker. My guess is that it makes up 25% of the ad income
In their latest (Q3/21) report they are hairs breadth away from Netflix revenue figures: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/youtube-q...
Considering that Netflix is profitable with the immense cost of producing their own content, I don't find it far fetched that Youtube would be profitable too (albeit with very different cost structure).
Odysee
WTV
Bitchute
Daily Motion
Peer Tube
..ad infinitum
There's literally hundreds out there, not everything needs to be 'Facebook scale' to be successful.
edit: formatting
Literally over a billion smart phones are sold each year, most of which have YouTube apps on them already. At the moment nothing can reasonably compete with YouTube. They can, of course, be successful but will remain a niche product.
https://framatube.org/w/217eefeb-883d-45be-b7fc-a788ad8507d3
here is a good video intro to peertube which has subtitles
1. It consumes nearly unlimited bandwidth.
2. It consumes nearly unlimited CPU for transcoding and serving media at different bitrates.
3. It consumes massive resources to police, from user moderation to appeasing content owners by building systems and databases like ContentID, etc.
4. It generates endless PR and legal headaches, which also costs a lot of money.
5. A huge amount of work has gone into getting users hooked through algorithms that seek to maximize watch time.
6. A huge amount of work has gone into building a network of advertisers who want to pay to put their ads on the platform.
7. And importantly, a huge amount of work has gone into building up an ecosystem of video producers who make their entire living off of YouTube and spend countless hours producing content for them at no cost to YouTube. Obviously YouTube isn't giving out Golden Play Button plaques out of the kindness of their heart. That's marketing.
And despite all this, Youtube almost always works perfectly for almost all users. People click on their phones and the videos just play - all around the world, even while traveling on transit, etc.
There are very few companies who have the resources to attempt to compete with that. Vimeo has obviously given up targeting the same mass market audience. Other competitors without unlimited deep pockets can't seem to make a dent.
It's a lot like asking why doesn't someone just make "a better Google." Unless you have unlimited resources and an unlimited budget, it probably isn't possible. It's smarter to make something else tangental in video that can outcompete Google instead of facing them head on. See: Twitch, TikTok, etc.
youtube's strategy (e.g., 'the reason') was to leverage google's resources to undermine the revenue-making opportunities of the whole market so that it could outlast them to domination. it used google's (monopolistic) advantages in search and online advertising, as well as its capital warchest, to effect this strategy. that warchest, for instance, allowed it to offer free hosting/streaming, something that was difficult for smaller players to do. google's dominance in search allowed it to offer premium advertising to youtube videos. google's dominance in online advertising (again, monopolistically) gave youtube an advantage in monetization and targeting.
in short, this wasn't a story of a scrappy competitor overcoming the odds to become the market leader. it was hoarded capital and monopoly advantage being deployed to corner another market. that is, it was an (unprosecuted) anti-trust violation.
[0]: note the broader connotation of 'technical', not limited to just technology
Your side point about it supposedly being an anti-trust violation isn't even a proper answer to the question.
IMO, it might be wise for Netflix to start their own YouTube-like service. For example, subscribe to Netflix, get access to user-created videos on a separate app. The best part is that users would then generate content for a fraction of what they currently pay to produce content, and they could have basically what YouTube has, but ad-free.
The key part there is "if they wanted."
Any upstart would have to burn who knows how much capital to try and ramp up, hosting videos for free and getting only a tiny fraction of the ad revenue that Google can extract from a video due to their smaller scale. Even if somebody wanted to subsidize this with reserves or VC funding, the endgame is that they're competing directly against Google, and if faced with actual competition Google can always afford to undercut them until they ran out of reserves or VC funding.
Far better for these sites to claim a niche that Google has no interest in and just fly below the radar.
[0] MindGeek operates under a complex structure of multiple companies in countries such as the British Virgin Islands, Canada, Curaçao, Cyprus, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, Mauritius, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States.[60][8] Its structure has been described as mostly a way to avoid corporate tax by a de facto Canadian company;[8][3][61] with billing companies in Ireland,[62] subsidiaries in Curaçao and holding ones in Cyprus and Luxembourg, all countries that have been identified as tax havens or having lax tax regulations. Canada also has special tax treaties with Luxembourg, the legal headquarters of MindGeek, where a Canadian subsidiary is exempt from taxes paid on royalties to its Luxembourg parent.[8]
Video quality is low.
Video amount should probably be 1000 if not 10000 smaller than yt.
I'm not aware of millions uploading hour and hours of high quality videos to their platform.
I myself only go there for a short period of time.
I know plenty of people who keep streams from yt running in parallel.
YouTube achieved this in 15 years time with the help of Google's enormous resources. YouTube competitor would need to have some innovation that is hard for YouTube to replicate.
Funny enough TikTok was able to replicate YouTube in a few years time but only for short videos so it shows you don't need all that what you mentioned. Innovation is what you need.
Like all things? The proper engineering effort is hard to find in such a capacity and a budget to do all of this is overwhelming for most tech companies to attempt where an ROI can be seen within tolerable risk.
It's like saying we could live on mars if we had "proper engineering effort, timeline and budget".
Isn't this the MO of vimeo? Target higher quality content, and allow pay-per-hosting to avoid ads?
I thought HN was the opposite of this - finding ways to upend fat companies from occupying monopoly positions. "Hacker" news.
More reasons to break up Big Tech from a government regulations perspective - The only democratic politician talking about it is Elizabeth Warren. But many are upending large incumbents without gov reg - Stripe ("Increase the GDP of the internet") and Square in payments/ecommerce space. Tesla taking on Big 4. I would like to see a real competitor for Google search. Perhaps Algolia? Their search is incredible on HN.
Yes! I find any other video website that is not YouTube to be simply unusable. Don't get me started with Spotify's video player. My thought when I see a website using anything else: just put the damn thing on YouTube! The players suck, the experience suck, everything sucks on other products.
This is like asking "why don't we live on the moon except that there is no atmosphere there and it's pretty far away?". Those two reasons are the main reasons Youtube is the clear winner in its field, saying "apart from that" does not make a lot of sense. If you'd want to start a competitor to take on Youtube, you either need to focus on a tiny niche not well served by Youtube (extreme far right or far left personalities perhaps, or porn) or you would need to find a way to match Google money (maybe partner up with FB/Microsoft/Amazon/etc) so you can buy popular creators away from Youtube.
The competitors have a hard time gaining traction because in the way many of us would expect because we live in a different world from when YouTube first became a thing.
YouTube in 2005 was way different. You could find just about anything on there. Pranks, home videos, entire TV shows, bumfights, skits, you name it. Mostly young people used it, and back then the youth were a little more "based" than my impression of Gen Z today. I remember older folks like my parents almost universally dismissing YouTube as "a bunch of crap" and how wrong I felt they were. Guess who turned out to be right about the future of information and entertainment!
Today, I'd wager everyone's interacted with YouTube at least once. There is nothing edgy or fringe about YouTube anymore. It's a mainstream media platform saddled with its past that it just can't shake. Without big advertisers and big audiences, it wouldn't be sustainable, thus it has developed to not offend the normies or their political allies.
Many have moved over to other platforms, but they are essentially the same kind of audience and creators that were on YouTube back in the old days. The so-called normies who didn't take YouTube seriously back then are now easily frightened of the dangerous content found on alt-tech. They are unlikely to ever move away from the warm fuzzy feeling only provided by the MSM and Silicon Valley.
Although I desire people be a little less allergic to supposedly dangerous content, can we really blame people for being disinterested or avoidant to YouTube competitors?
Maybe this is the way it should be. Average Joes/Janes/Jaydens will be happy on YouTube and TikTok, and the ends of the bell curve will find their place on smaller platforms that aren't interested in pleasing everyone.
Is it possible to beat YouTube itself with a different experience but the same, longer-form, format? If so, what would that experience even look like, especially on mobile?
So it's not the auto-play that's crucial, it's realizing that the user is giving you a signal. YouTube has been ignoring that signal. Perhaps it's a performance issue that makes them unable to?
Maybe focus on content longer than the YouTube average , like courses and documentaries and in depth video podcasts?
To be a serious alternative you’d need apps for Apple TV, Android TV, Roku plus iOS and Android and a solid desktop browser.
2) YouTube is an entrenched platform with a huge audience and wide reach. This causes a positive feedback loop where creators upload to YouTube because that's where the viewers are, and viewers flock to YouTube because that's where the creators are. This means that any creator that wants to upload elsewhere will struggle to find an audience, and any viewer looking to switch will lack content to view.
This means that few companies have the resources to even attempt to compete with YouTube, and those that do struggle to find consistent users. YouTube certainly has its issues, but there isn't an obvious way for a major competitor to enter the space.
Going a step further, people use YouTube like a video search engine. If people want to see a video they type in the terms they are looking for and see the results. They don't search for an alternative platform first, and then enter the keywords on those sites. Perhaps designing a video search engine that looks across multiple platforms would address this?
Even though some high profile civil libertarian and free speech advocates like Glenn Greenwald and Zaid Jilani have chosen Rumble as home, YouTube is still lights years ahead. But if they continue to censor, alternative free speech platform will emerge.
The real competitor won't be a video hosting service, it will be a content monetization model competitive to advertising. Even content monetization is a weak way of thinking about it, because by abstracting it from the people who want a certain kind of content, you've pre-defined your solution as just another tech without a clear market (a non-product).
The question of "I have all these videos, how do I sell them?" is completely different from, "How do I sell videos?" or "What will these people really pay for and how does video distribution get it to them?"
The question isn't how to reinvent streaming, it's how to discover something someone will pay for. Youtube's product isn't content, their product is the distribution it provides to people who make it - and a combination of the data and channel it provides to advertisers. That's what they sell.
So, do you really want to make another product for advertisers? Even if you really like advertisers and did, investing in another video streaming platform seems like the least smart way to do that right now.
The next real competitor to youtube will look more like AppleTV than Rumble. Arguably, if I will pay $15.99 for a season of Ancient Aliens, I'll pay $7.99 for all of 3blue1brown. It's a different monetization model, and that's the real competition.
If I wanted to make a video streaming product, I would pop up a level and find a market then determine whether their need was more for produced content, or for distribution, and then solve for the economics of that desire. The quesiton isn't how do I monetize this landfill of content, the real question is, who is this customer and what do they want?
I've thought some of this through, and reach out via my profile if you are with a company that is serious about this.
Instead, YouTube the video search engine is the product without any competition.
And since people search for a video on YouTube and not on odysee or peertube, these other platforms have poor video discoverablity. On these platforms I tend to watch creators that I already found using YouTube.
The video search is what somebody building a competitor needs to be focusing on.
Look at Mixer, and in specific Shrouds transition to Mixer. Almost nobody followed him there. When he came back to Twitch he was the single biggest streamer they have ever had with 200K+ viewers.
Technology is feature monopolistic as long as it's "free", the evolution always happens by constructive destruction. Eventually there will be something that replaces Twitch by being _fundamentally_ better at capturing our attention without needing OBS.
People that haven't moved to Twitch from YouTube simply do not know Twitch exists or haven't tried it because they lack time.
Or maybe the transition is going from passive to active and some people wish to stay passive?
As for video anyone with a computer and a range capable HTTP server can distribute it, the problem is competing with bandwidth.
Large streamers have humor, but chat is completely meaningless with them.
Small streamers (mostly gamedev) are the community that is meaningful.
It's surpisingly small still, only a few thousand viewers that all watch many of the same devs.
Game development is really the only meaningful thing you can do today that does not involve energy (food, heat and water = electricity).
Many well funded companies have successfully drawn some content with money in the form of production budget, guarantees & advances but few with a developed audience elsewhere are willing to give it up and people watch the content they like where it is most convenient.
Japanese Nico Nico is the 34th most visited site in Japan, so I guess they are still doing okay.
For certain things, I think Twitch is very much a real competitor, and I think the best example to answer your question, on what a competitor would need to get an in on the market - a unique twist on video hosting.
Personally I consider Netflix, HBO and Disney+ the biggest competitors. It's basically the internet version of cable vs terrestrial TV, imho. Youtube isn't so much about sharing your vacation video, as it is a platform to turn amateur content creators into professional content creators (with an odd side hustles of hosting professional music videos).
If someone hosts something on Vimeo, I always perceive that as giving users a worse experience just to make a point. Vimeo embeds don't sync how far I've watched across devices. It doesn't even remember it in a single tab on a single device. (Maybe that's because I don't have a Vimeo account but I do have a YouTube account. But that's part of the mount.)
TikTok (there is a reason YouTube released “shorts”), Twitch and Facebook (which also supports live streaming).
Vimeo, Metacafe and Dailymotion used to be a lot more competitive with YouTube too. In some cases even having a larger market share than YT at one point.
Plus there are plenty of adult streaming services too albeit they don’t directly compete due to YouTubes rules about video content.
I think a large part of YouTubes success was because Google bought them back when Googles reputation was still top notch. I remember being indifferent about YouTube (even preferring Vimeo and Metacafe) but started using TouTube because of Google’s tie in. Now I use it in spite of Google.
Yes, Youtube needs a real competitor, and it's the sort of thing that would be very difficult to do as a for-profit company. I'd begin by asking Jimmy Wales and the like. Peertube's a great start.
What if The act of uploading and hosting had to be a separate company from the act of searching and viewing? What would "YouTube" look like if someone could write their own app that had access to all of the same content? What would "YouTube" look like if someone could provide their own uploading and hosting service?
While you might not think of them as competitors, they provide a very similar service.
Centralized : Dailymotion, Bitchute, Rumble, DTube, Vimeo, Vidlii, DLive, Triller
Decentralized : Odysee(LBRY), Peertube
In terms of medium/long form videos, plenty of time is spent watching those on Instagram and Facebook. For shorter "clip"-style videos, those are watched on TikTok, Twitter, and Snapchat.
Then you have livestreaming, in which Twitch and once again Facebook/Instagram have large viewership.
Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
If YouTube were just a website like any other video host, people wouldn't care. Do you really care about which video host a video you want to watch is on? No, more than likely you care about the video itself.
But YouTube is an app, on your phone, click it and search for what you want, oh whatever you're looking for is probably on YouTube anyway.
And that's another thing, YouTube is basically the only site with google search embedded into itself that only searches itself. Imagine a video search engine like YouTube that showed you results from all sorts of video sites.
These two things together are why. Want to find a video? Click the video finding app on your phone. Oh, it only searches YouTube? Oh well, the video is probably on YouTube anyway.
Other niches are history videos and music analysis videos, the former which gets demonetized and the latter receives copyright strikes with abandon.
Many history channels are on Armchair History TV: https://armchairhistory.tv/content-creators/
Adam Neely (music analysis) is on Nebula: https://nebula.app/
I'm quite confident you'll find Mindgeek/Pornhub has a Youtube-esque unassailable position in that market segment. Unless you're catering to illegal content, but I think you'll find that market isn't the greatest for building a profitable business on.
...and this is also an incredibly hard sell to any upstart, since to creators, reach is usually more important than money.
Source: Worked for one of the last semi-serious local Youtube competitors in our country who tried this strategy and miserably failed, after which the site was effectively shut down and rebranded as a storefront for the TV station that bought it.
TikTok is doing this. Using the same playbook as YT (paying creators for views) and they're creating a unique moat by building great tools for creators. iMovie may have helped YT get started by giving everyone an easy tool for video making, and TT is bringing comparable tools in-house.
They're also avoiding the issue of letting creators get too big and dictating the platform like some think started happening to youtube, because the algo pushes smaller creators and doesn't put focus on who you follow. This really shows their Chinese heritage (CCP wouldn't want individuals to have too much influence without being replaceable).
Also, i've seen some large youtubers or youtube catagories try to band together to make apps/sites that offer that content without YT influence. (eg. some tech reviewers, or some niche content like relaxation videos or meditation guides). If i were more entrepreneurial i'd throw my hat in this space and use Cloudflare's new hosting to lower costs.
As a competitor? It's not even a bug on their radar...
It's like waiting for Mastodon to replace Facebook and co...
> Although I desire people be a little less allergic to supposedly dangerous content, can we really blame people for being disinterested or avoidant to YouTube competitors?
My takes on this is that DMCA/copyright laws is huge barrier of scaling. Lots of contents providers (I mean small players) are not comfortable expanding their platform due to copyright laws. It would requires to have a human moderation, legal contact, etc. Content Farms and Media Companies are huge abuser of DMCA takedowns, you can see the effects on YouTube. It is ramparts with legal issues because Google rather to use the bots to deal with the issues and that didn't help. Google allows companies to spam the takedowns with random urls that are not relevant to the contents.
Also public domain contents is another issues as well. There are companies that use DMCA takedown on content that are public domain which allows fair use. Sony Entertainments did this a few times, and they are not the only one doing this blatantly. They can do this because they knows they won't be accountable for it.
There are illegal contents uploaded daily and it have to be taken down which the small players don't have the resources to do so.
There are a lot of legal hurdles that small players need to account for before trying to scale bigger. It comes with risks, some players are not willing to take that risks, even Section 230 offers protections. But it didn't offer protection against companies that are brutal and ruthless with faking DMCA takedowns.
I had not heard of Odysee/LBRY, so thanks for the tip.
LiveLeak was a bit too extreme for me, personally, though I am glad it existed, puzzled to see it go. Anything replace it?
Vimeo is nice for finding avant-garde or art videos.
There are curated, paid services for films like Mubi, Shudder and NoBudge.
I always thought the point was to make it easy for anyone to publish an original video? (And then to make it easy for anyone to watch the video.)
Unquestionably. If you recall, YouTube originally made its mark by having pirated copies of the SNL Lazy Sunday skit floating around, which quickly saw it become recognized it as the place to watch all kinds of pirated TV shows.
Eventually they started enforcing duration limits to quash people uploading entire episodes, but it wasn't until the content ID system was implemented that it started to see that type of content disappear and the 'homemade' stuff take over.
The home videos may have always been there, but it wasn't why people were using the service originally.
Beyond that there are some folks with some free speech ideals but even that devolves into "anything goes" and they turn a blind eye to the results because it is messy / unpleasant.
It's nice to see that something you disagree with strongly, like alt-right content, can be labeled hyper-toxic and not be downvoted into oblivion. It is encouraging that HN as a platform can tolerate a strong opinion without retaliating.
...but at the same time anyone who deviates from progressive orthodoxy in any way will be labeled alt-right.
So in addition to the hyper-toxic folks, you will get people looking for a platform allowing debate and a broad range of ideas.
Not to claim that Brand can't be annoying, but he's not alt-right and I can't imagine them both occupying the same space.
The stimulating nature of extremism makes it really hard for a new platform to be pro-"sensible free speech".
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59052155
Censorship advocates always get hit by the divine justice boomerang.
Which is all fine and good until people start filing copyright claims, lawyering up, withdrawing adverts, and cancelling subscriptions. Not to mention the possibility of governments intervening.
Sooner or later regulation comes, whether that's directly, or indirectly via market pressures.
(Note that this isn't necessarily a bad thing - or a good thing, for that matter - just a thing. An example where it might be seen as more positive for, say, a government intervention to occur is Facebook/Meta. I'm certainly losing patience with Mark Zuckerberg's indifference to the individual and societal damage his platforms are causing.)
YouTube is a social network as much as a video hosting service, and for professional applications, embeds in websites, portfolios, etc, it's often a bad idea to include things that will detract from other content or take users away from the site. YouTube embeds are still fairly branded, may show ads, etc.
YouTube has no interest in this market, so I think Vimeo will be fine.
Yet I prefer websites use youtube to embed content. Whenever I encounter an embedded vimeo video, I'm asked to fill a captcha. This almost never happens with youtube.
I also signed up for a curiosity stream trial (or was it its competitor? idk), watched one video, only to delete my account afterwards. Their video player doesn’t support left-right keys and when I missed a sentence I had no chance to rewind just a little, because in an hour+ long video you can’t just point to a second with your mouse. It’s so stupid technically that I can’t imagine who could do that for a platform which is advertised from every crack.
I don’t think that youtube no-competition is just a network effect and ads and money. Even if we were to find youtube deleted tomorrow, both viewers and content creators would have a fucking hard time to continue their usual activities. I often blame youtube for its ui/ux, but—and this is my personal opinion—its competition is just trash.
But I'm not interested in an average case, and if given the opportunity to switch between a blocklist and an allowlist approach, I would do so frequently. Unfortunately we're not given that opportunity whereas I am given that opportunity in many other different cases, the 'Mark as Unread' button on e-mails and RSS readers being one such example.
That's the rub: Whenever a new platform starts up, marketing itself as the "free speech alternative" to some big, mainstream platform, what always ends up happening is the new platform's user base consists entirely of people who got kicked off the mainstream platform--leading to all the toxicity and problems noted in this sub-thread. You need to be more than a place where the cast-offs from mainstream sites hang out. You need to bring the mainstream to your platform too.
So that leaves a volume of shit-tier players. That's not that worthwhile.
> Game development is really the only meaningful thing you can do today that does not involve energy
I don't even know what you are trying to say with this. What makes game development more or less "meaningful" than other activities? How does game development not require energy?
Are you tastes in any way representative of any large segment of the population though? Like, do these creators have thousands or millions of viewers?
Yes, Minute Physics and Veritasium are two examples I remember off the top of my head (not an LBRY user since I quit algorithmic video binges after abusing them possibly worse then I do HN, IRC, and assorted doomscrolling now :P).
Of course from a "can I adopt X" perspective, cross-posted content to X is fine, even if most users watch it on YouTube.
But for that to be meaninful on a larger scale most popular content should be cross-posted to Odysee (or original to it).
E.g. Veritasium is for sure popular, but it might just be part of a tiny slither of YouTube content that made it to the platform - so that would mean I could adopt Odysee as a YouTube replacement only if my interests intersect with that slither.
And now since Zuckerberg is cybersquatting the term we need to find a new one.
How about "the internet", wadda ya say?
The physical world is shrinking in every metric possible and it's accelerating.
The only way to escape it is through virtualisation, the kids are allready living there.
The point was that unless you already have a money printing business in another area that you can use to chase this for years without budgetary constraints, it would be very difficult to build something of a similar scale. I think you are arguing a point that my post largely already agrees with.
Any company has an edge on any non existent company, because they exist - they have the tools, the infrastructure, the knowledge needed to run the business, all things that the non existent company first has to aquire. Doesn't explain why nobody else can do it! Because things, in general, can be aquired. But clarity did: Youtube has Google. Youtube was able to aquire things nobody else could.
Example: You said youtube needs near unlimited bandwidth. This argument doesn't show me why there can't be a competitor. Youtube's business model seems to pay off, so you should be able to convince an investor to pay you, too, unlimited bandwidth, right? Money is immaterial if you can show that you can make more of it at a later stage.
Surely the CDN for that huge streaming library is the expensive part of their infra.
As long as you move a few PB around the globe on your video release date, Netflix is fine.
It's very easy to build a Netflix in comparison to yt.
I would argue that for Netflix going into yt direction would eat up there revenue baseline fast.
More static content than YT. Better viewer:creator ratio. Fewer content headaches. Content moderation is lower volume and amounts to watching the film. And closer to their existing product fit.
It's actually kind of mind-boggling that Netflix hasn't pivoted into a turnkey solution (standard deal + optional financing support + broadcast platform) for mass-market film-making. Everyone's content starved, it's an obvious weakness that Amazon / Disney / ATT are blind to, and somehow Reed Hastings hasn't pushed in that direction. It's literally what Netflix is famous for doing (twice!): be the platform.
I've been mostly hearing the opposite, most people feel like they have more content they want to watch than they have time to.
For example, you claim that Vimeo "vimeo has all of those [features] to some degree".
But it doesn't. Vimeo isn't ad supported (this is literally their main differentiator from youtube). Doesn't appear to do algorithmic curation/recommendation (again, they consider this a differentiator), and has a tiny fraction of the upload rate and watchtime of youtube (so bandwidth and transcoding cost are lower).
Those are related to their distinct strategies: Youtube aims to be the product where anyone can share video for free (that's youtube's strategy!). Vimeo doesn't aim to do that. Doing the first invites challenges of scale that the second doesn't. Youtube operates at a scale where it makes sense to hire silicon engineers to build custom video transcoding chips. That doesn't make sense for vimeo.
You can maybe argue that Youtube was only successful because of Google's existing ad business (although I don't know how true/organizationally valid this argument is), but the idea that the "strategy" behind Youtube was to be illegal is sort of ridiculous.
And heck, OP of the thread even offers examples of successful competitors in the broad video media space: Twitch and TikTok (and arguably also Instagram via Reels). Youtube does have competitors in terms of video social media. It also has competitors in terms of video hosting. What it doesn't have is competitors in terms of scale (Reels and Tiktok limit content size, Twitch stores only a small fraction of streamed videos, vimeo makes you pay for the storage and bandwidth you use). That's due to a lot of technical optimizations that are difficult to replicate.
To be clear, even if we assume Youtube's rise was anticompetitive, your argument relies on that being the explicit strategy, which well, there's decent documentation to believe it wasn't. Assuming that because a bad thing happened, everyone involved is evil, is weird, and requires you to jump through weird hoops to justify.
in a competitive market, there are two broad strategies available: cost (walmart) and differentiation (apple). youtube coerced its market into being favorable to itself by leveraging the anti-competitive aspects i mentioned earlier. that simply trumps product tactics, and even these two competitive market strategies; it subverts entire markets unfairly and uneconomically. i really can't teach you strategy or market economics in an hn comment; you need to go study that yourself. also, arguing from emotion is a sure-fire way to lead yourself astray.
less flippantly, you can actually find a lot of free mba courses online now. here’s one page listing some resources (halfway down): https://www.uopeople.edu/blog/the-best-free-online-mba-cours...
uopeople offers a cheap online mba, apparently accredited even (i personally can’t vouch for it’s quality though). investopedia is also a good reference resource for looking up random business concepts.
Have you read anything by Karl Marx regarding captialism? You seem to know a ton about capital and how it pervades society and social stratification of the workforce and labor.
i've read a bit of marx but mostly in digest form. das kapital and adam smith's wealth of nations are on my list of older, original works that i want to read in full. i'm sympathetic to the labor theory of value, which both explored in their works, but most modern economists seem to eschew and even fear.