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Ask HN: Video recommendation platform as a way to compete with YouTube?

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Re: Ask HN: Video recommendation platform as a way to compete with YouTube?

#51

Post by tylerdinner »

jasode wrote: post #25
tylerdinner wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't feel these unavoidable disadvantages are as black and white and you describe. To circumvent the fake title/bait & switch practices, you could allow users to flag videos as misleading, vote them as spam, etc. Put the number of flags next to the video, add the ability to not even see flagged videos. Further, scripts could be used to report video play statistics to the scrape site. Drawback is users would have t…

>To circumvent the fake title/bait & switch practices, you could allow users to flag videos as misleading, vote them as spam, etc. And now you've re-created the "Amazon 1-star ratings left by competitors instead of real buyers" and/or the "false DMCA takedown claims of public domain or original music" . E.g. an honest person creates a "How to sew a mask at home to protect from COVID" which is the real content but a b…

Damn you're totally right. You'd have to have a subscription fee and a team of mods to fix that.

Re: Ask HN: Video recommendation platform as a way to compete with YouTube?

#52

Post by mtnGoat »

DoctorOW wrote: post #29
mtnGoat wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making mountains out of mole hills, IMHO. Streaming at large scale isn't hard, you just gotta do it. Certainly wasnt the hardest problem I've worked on. All of this is now easy as ever to solve, AWS can transcode, you don't even need to know anything about codec anymore. Source: used to manage some of the largest adult tube sites.

Your comment seems to make the assumption that this is a technical problem. You're right that it'd be possible to make a YouTube site by oneself. If one did it with GCP they could be using the exact same hardware and very similar software as YouTube. However, the real problem the parent talks about is financial. YouTube gets all this hosting at cost for Google. A YouTube competitor has to pay the AWS, GCP, etc. marku…

Valid point, without money to burn it's not possible in any market.

Re: Ask HN: Video recommendation platform as a way to compete with YouTube?

#53

Post by nwsm »

KMnO4 wrote: post #11

Video hosting is actually a lot harder than it seems. - For starters, you need the server space to host it. Videos can be large -- a 10 minute 4k video can be nearly 5gb in size. - Then you need to the CPU to transcode it to various formats and bitrates (Youtube keeps more than 30 different formats sometimes) - Then you need to bandwidth to actually serve all that data. Ideally you have servers geolocated close to th…

This isn't really relevant to OP. There are lots of sites that host video already.. YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, etc.

A successful discovery platform would allow content creators to publish to any platform they want (or their own site), and still maintain their viewership.

> As someone with a slow internet connection, I generally despise self hosted videos.

To this I would say that at this point, storage and CDNs are becoming a commodity, and "self hosted" does not have to mean slow. I can build and host my own site on a home server while still serving videos from GCP CDN. Now I have similar to performance to YouTube without the YouTube.

Re: Ask HN: Video recommendation platform as a way to compete with YouTube?

#54

Post by cblconfederate »

nemothekid wrote: post #20

> Content creators don't want to leave the platform because of discoverability Discovery is still incredibly hard on YouTube. YouTube is a search engine, adding another one won't fix that. I'm also skeptical that anyone could do search better than Google. When creators say "they can't leave because of discovery", they mean "I spent 10 years telling people my address is youtube.com/creator, and if I lose that, most pe…

> "I spent 10 years telling people my address is youtube.com/creator

channel urls are like /channel/UCoMdktPbSTixAyNGwb and i ve never heard youtubers spelling out usernames, but rather to search for the name

if one would start a video link service, they d start with a short url (+stats) maker

i think you re right about monetization though. As bad as google is at least they pay content makers, unlike the rest of big tech

Re: Ask HN: Video recommendation platform as a way to compete with YouTube?

#55

Post by anderspitman »

We definitely need to decouple discovery from hosting.

I'm not even sure you would need to do any crawling. Maybe you could just let people submit links to videos hosted elsewhere. Kind of like you can submit any URL to the Internet Archive. But in this case you would use the frequency of duplicate submissions (along with in-house upvotes) to build out a recommendation platform.

Re: Ask HN: Video recommendation platform as a way to compete with YouTube?

#56

Post by meowsinspace »

I think this a great idea! YouTube recommendations are extremely lacking and is leaving a ton on the table in terms of a great user experience. I don’t trust that I’m being recommended content that they think is best for me. Rather is it based on if the creator paid Youtube to promote their video?

Re: Ask HN: Video recommendation platform as a way to compete with YouTube?

#57

Post by phenkdo »

mIOAMDA wrote: post #46
caseyf7 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how would you make enough money to support a popular service? Will youtube allow you to place ads next to the videos on your site? The users would still receive the pre/mid/post roll ads.

I'm thinking of first targeting a very specific niche of content and making a recommendation client out of that. If the recommendations are really top notch than maybe people interested in that niche would be wiling to pay to get them (This is what another commenter suggested).

That's the core problem with such ideas: Blekko, metacafe et al have tried it. It's getting people to pay for this service that seemed an impossible hurdle to cross.

Re: Ask HN: Video recommendation platform as a way to compete with YouTube?

#58

Post by corobo »

anderspitman wrote: post #55

We definitely need to decouple discovery from hosting. I'm not even sure you would need to do any crawling. Maybe you could just let people submit links to videos hosted elsewhere. Kind of like you can submit any URL to the Internet Archive. But in this case you would use the frequency of duplicate submissions (along with in-house upvotes) to build out a recommendation platform.

I like the idea of Peertube for this, and a search engine popped up the other day too

Search: https://sepiasearch.org/

Hosting: https://joinpeertube.org/

Re: Ask HN: Video recommendation platform as a way to compete with YouTube?

#59

Post by javajosh »

ryandrake wrote: post #27
javajosh wrote: post #15

Remember, convenience trumps all other concerns in capitalism. So your distributed solution has to be as convenient, or more so, to use than YouTube for content creators. You also didn't mention monetization, and again, it needs to be convenient. Allowing "roll your own" monetization is great, but putting a default revenue method is essential. I think it can be done. The product looks to me like a cross-platform thic…

Honestly, I think if you deliberately left monetization out, you could really improve the quality of videos you host. Gone would be all those "filler" videos that exist just to juice the ad algorithm. You'd also lose all that "Hey guys! Remember to Like and Subscribe!" junk because there's be no monetary incentive. When I go searching for videos, I really don't want to see all those videos people pumped out in order…

Not sure why you're downvoted, I think its a useful contribution. There is a TON of horrible content on youtube - text-to-voice slideshows that are clearly the output of someone clever enough to put it together, but not clever enough to actually contribute anything to society. If they had to host their own stuff, I think that would put a damper on it too. OTOH if you self host there would be NO gatekeeping at all, for good or ill (and honestly, I think it would turn out pretty badly if todays info-space is any indication).

The key, I think, is to overlay a network of blacklists over distributed content, and enforce one new law: communication requires consent. I can see a new industry of small, interconnected groups of curators helping individuals weed out the noise - all while maintaining an individuals right to consume as much noise as they want. Reputation would no longer be a single number, but rather in the context of these groups, to which individuals voluntarily belong.

The important thing would be to connect content to the creator, such that the blacklist is more effective. So, it may not be a real identity, but it should be consistent: that is, your id can't be used to find you in the real world, but it can (and should) be associated consistently with everything you make and distribute. (Although I would certainly want some sort of decay function there, since I don't think people should answer to the same degree for the stupid shit they did 10 or 20 years ago.)

Re: Ask HN: Video recommendation platform as a way to compete with YouTube?

#60

Post by lurker619 »

doh wrote: post #44
jasode wrote: post #10

>Why don't we just make a platform that crawls the internet for videos and build a recommendation algorithm. Therefore no matter where you host your videos you'll be easily discover? Because there are fundamental tradeoffs of _information_ and _meta_information_ that a system has that factors into recommendations. People upload about ~500 hours of videos to Youtube every minute.[1] Yes, that means that centralization…

You bring some interesting points, but you are off the mark on what's the true challenge. We [0] actually indexed "all" content on YouTube and dozens of other platforms. Not just metadata, but the videos. We could easily run search engine like this. In fact, we have explored it in the past. We also came up with page rank-like algorithm that allows us to bootstrap the experience and eventually move to usage based sort…

Why not a chrome extension that would overlay recommendations on top of a regular youtube page? Then you just have to convince users to install it once.
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