bilibili in China Niconico in Japan
bilibili is good. if anyone want, also can check the video of trailer,
https://www.dreamtruegroup.com/diesel-tank-trailer/
Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?
51–60 of 226 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?
#52CEO of vimeo will cry themself to sleep after reading this post
I tried to use vimeo, but even if it had content on it that interests me, I find it very frustrating to use for some intuitive reason. Maybe it’s constant flashing of wait-spinners, maybe no place to discover things. It feels like yet another pic hosting but for videos. https://vimeo.com doesn’t look like a promising landing for 99% of users either.
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.
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?
#53Because RSS/Atom subscriptions as the standard for following things you like, across websites, didn't really catch on, in part because no browsers (or mobile OS vendors) really championed the feature in their UX to make it better than having lots of interfaces on different sites (looking at you, Firefox—add it to the list of dropped balls).
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.
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?
#54You mean like a company? I mean, this has been answered a million times over. It's scale, it's always scale. 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.
Makes me wonder if this is a case where regulation needs to inject competition, like when we broke up Ma Bell into separate companies.
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?
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?
#551) Video hosting is very expensive, due to high bandwidth and storage requirements. This is made worse when emulating YouTube, with its "anyone can upload for free, and anyone can view for free" model.
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.
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?
#56Gfycat and imgur are pretty good alternative to post videos.
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.
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?
#57There is a new "free speech" alternative called Rumble emerging. Rumble for now promises Not to become a censorship platform like YouTube is now currently. https://rumble.com/ 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 wil…
The problem with media platforms that market themselves as pro-free-speech is that they attract alt-right content - and their hyper-toxic followers - like a warm pile of shit attracts flies, even if that's not the intent of the platform operators.
I have this idea in my head that most people (users, even platform creators) think "free speech" and they mostly just think "my speech" or "speech I agree with".
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.
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?
#58Any viable YouTube competitor is going to be considerably different from YouTube.
I would argue that both TikTok and Netflix are very successful YouTube competitors.
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?
#59Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?
#60In addition to the other comments pointing out the moat, it's also just a good product. There's some controversy here or there, but the watching experience is fast and good, it's available almost everywhere (phones, laptop, smart tvs, consoles, ...), and it just works well.
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.)