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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?

#161

Post by ndiddy »

mattl wrote: post #28
betwixthewires wrote: post #6

It comes preinstalled on all mobile phones. 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, Y…

No longer preinstalled on iPhones. Not for a long while now since Apple’s app was discontinued in favor of Google’s own app.

It's a shame, Apple's app was far better than Google's, to the extent that I stayed on iOS 5 (last version that had the old app) until they shut off the API it was using.

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

#163

Post by rognjen »

mohanmcgeek wrote: post #131
rognjen wrote: post #114

Other than a variety of technical reasons already mentioned, I think VEVO is an amazing moat that would be very difficult for even the most funded of competitors to cross.

This would have been a moat in 2013. But these days, at least where I live, I get music videos on my music app. 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.

In general, that's a good point. It's not as important as it used to be, you're right.

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.

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

#164

Post by JeremyNT »

jimmaswell wrote: post #92
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…

Sounds like PornHub or similar could easily branch into providing a separate service for general videos if they wanted. They already have all this stuff down for the most part.

> Sounds like PornHub or similar could easily branch into providing a separate service for general videos if they wanted. They already have all this stuff down for the most part.

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.

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

#165

Post by extra88 »

cuddlybacon wrote: post #162

e

> Users are going to upload copyrighted material, and the law says that's the platform's responsibility.

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.

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

#166

Post by randomdata »

armchairhacker wrote: post #126
randomdata wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but has YouTube really changed? 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 i…

When was the content id system implemented? I'm sure there were plenty of pirated videos on YouTube (honestly there still are but they use cuts/filters/awful quality to get around), but I remember homemade videos in the top charts even before 2008.

2007, if the internet is to be believed.

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

#167

Post by Jugurtha »

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…

>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.

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.

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

#168

Post by ageitgey »

clairity wrote: post #156
sushid wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

I think you misinterpreted my original post. My post was a list of some of the capital intensive challenges a competitor would have to solve now to operate a similar business to YouTube as it exists now (many of which aren't even technical, like growing an ad market and getting creators on board).

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.

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

#169

Post by joshuamorton »

clairity wrote: post #156
sushid wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

The strategy you describe is functionally "provide features that competitors cannot". You ascribe nefarious means to all of those features, but that isn' the only (or in many cases even the likeliest) motivation for providing those features.

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

#170

Post by Isthatablackgsd »

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…

> 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.

> 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.

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