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Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?

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Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?

#151

Post by ravenstine »

coldtea wrote: post #72
ravenstine wrote: post #20

It does have competitors. IMO, Odysee/LBRY is the most viable one but only time will tell because all the competitors lack some things and have been slow to develop. 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. Pran…

> IMO, Odysee/LBRY is the most viable As a competitor? It's not even a bug on their radar... It's like waiting for Mastodon to replace Facebook and co...

I mean in terms of having lots of the creators I like on it (around 80% I'm guessing), being less likely to become censorious, and isn't a broken piece of crap. I don't give a hoot whether they are an economic competitor.

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?

#152

Post by bkovacev »

ageitgey wrote: post #47

YouTube is a huge technical achievement that would require billions of dollars to replicate: 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 headac…

Not to downplay the tech, but you could replicate majority of the tech nowadays with proper engineering effort, proper timeline and a budget. YouTube competitor would need to beat them in the business side of things, which is extremely hard, however not unachievable. The company would need to have proper monetization, proper support with proper appeal system and to enable producers to create high quality content without the fear of their accounts being banned. I believe this would be sufficient enough to start making a dent in the YouTube creator base.

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?

#153

Post by clairity »

ageitgey wrote: post #47

YouTube is a huge technical achievement that would require billions of dollars to replicate: 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 headac…

you offer a largely technical[0] answer to a business (and a politicoeconomic) problem. this is a common perspective bias of tech-focused folks of all stripes, and leads to incorrect, or at least incomplete, solutions to the problems faced by businesses. some of those technical aspects support youtube's strategy of dominating the online video provider market, but none of them are (even collectively) the reason why youtube dominates. for instance, vimeo has all of those to some degree and doesn't dominate the market.

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

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?

#154

Post by sushid »

clairity wrote: post #153
ageitgey wrote: post #47

YouTube is a huge technical achievement that would require billions of dollars to replicate: 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 headac…

you offer a largely technical[0] answer to a business (and a politicoeconomic) problem. this is a common perspective bias of tech-focused folks of all stripes, and leads to incorrect, or at least incomplete, solutions to the problems faced by businesses. some of those technical aspects support youtube's strategy of dominating the online video provider market, but none of them are (even collectively) the reason why yo…

No one is asking how Youtube got there. The question is, how can you complete with it and I believe the above commenter gave a very reasonable answer.

Your side point about it supposedly being an anti-trust violation isn't even a proper answer to the question.

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?

#155

Post by spookthesunset »

jimbokun wrote: post #102
_hyn3 wrote: post #25

It's interesting that TikTok is a formidable competitor that focused on a different experience and a slightly different format (short form). Tiktok seems to work by choosing for you and only showing a single video at a time (esp on mobile, which is where it's really most at home), but allowing you to quickly reject that choice and learning from your rejections. Is it possible to beat YouTube itself with a different e…

> Is it possible to beat YouTube itself with a different experience but the same, longer-form, format? Maybe focus on content longer than the YouTube average , like courses and documentaries and in depth video podcasts?

Youtube has plenty of that content already.

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?

#156

Post by clairity »

sushid wrote: post #154
clairity wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you offer a largely technical[0] answer to a business (and a politicoeconomic) problem. this is a common perspective bias of tech-focused folks of all stripes, and leads to incorrect, or at least incomplete, solutions to the problems faced by businesses. some of those technical aspects support youtube's strategy of dominating the online video provider market, but none of them are (even collectively) the reason why yo…

No one is asking how Youtube got there. The question is, how can you complete with it and I believe the above commenter gave a very reasonable answer. Your side point about it supposedly being an anti-trust violation isn't even a proper answer to the question.

the parent comment was a list of technical attributes about how youtube got there (used as rationale for why it's impossible to compete). i countered that that's not how it got there, as it's emphasizing tactics, not strategy. it's hard to formulate a coherent competitive strategy if you entirely misunderstand your competitor's successful (if anti-competitive) strategy. it's like playing chess by focusing on taking all the pawns rather than the king.

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?

#157

Post by jonas21 »

systemvoltage wrote: post #112
ageitgey wrote: post #47

YouTube is a huge technical achievement that would require billions of dollars to replicate: 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 headac…

This is the least informative hyperbole I've read on HN. It's a bunch of smoke and mirrors, everything is unlimited, cannot be replicated, forget about it. Let's accept defeat. 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…

Are Stripe, Square, and Tesla not big tech? They have market caps of $95B, $88B, and $1.05T, respectively. And is YouTube not upending the incumbents (TV and traditional media) in the same way that they are?

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?

#158

Post by ItsMonkk »

sokoloff wrote: post #83
ItsMonkk wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the reason they are able to do so is because by rejecting a video, you don't see it anymore. On the other hand, if you are given a view of 5 videos on YouTube and you click next, what YouTube should be doing is rejecting all 5 and showing you a new 5. For some reason this doesn't happen on YouTube. When you come back to the frontpage, you see the same videos over and over and over again unless you manually tell Y…

I often want to see some of those 5 later, but just not now. I suspect that’s common enough that YT’s algorithms have learned that.

I think that, on average, you are probably correct. More people prefer the current behavior over the opposite behavior, where instead of 'Not Interested' one would be forced to select 'Interested', or perhaps 'Add to Watch List -> Chill Music'.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?

#159

Post by WheelsAtLarge »

It's mostly free and meets people's expectations. Also, one of the driving goals of silicon valley companies is to grow as large as possible as soon as possible so that it becomes a competitive advantage. At some point, it's impossible to complete against a giant even if the product is easy to replicate.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?

#160

Post by MattGaiser »

belltaco wrote: post #9

Bandwidth and storage cost a lot. YouTube wasn't even profitable till a few years ago. Any new "free speech" video platform will be inundated with content that YouTube bans, things like hate speech, gore and calls for violence etc. which are not palatable to advertisers.

Yeah, I wonder what YouTube spends just keeping child pornography off the site. It surely isn’t a small amount.
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