Ask HN: Video recommendation platform as a way to compete with YouTube? • Hacker News Board

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

#11

Post by KMnO4 » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 2:37 PM UTC

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 the user.

As someone with a slow internet connection, I generally despise self hosted videos. If your video won't load because I don't have a >100mbit connection, I will likely leave.

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

#12

Post by vemv » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 2:40 PM UTC

I like going on Youtube and see what gets recommended to me, sometimes I discover useful/entertaining stuff that way. But most times, the recommendations tend to be terrible:

- repetitive, as if they insisted in the same specific video dozens of times

- not using the full breadth of a given channel I've subscribed to, e.g. just recommending a few videos out of 100s

- recommending stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with my interests, simply because it's going viral or it's been a previous big hit in the mainstream

- similar channels almost never get recommended to me. This would be super useful, since maybe I'm subscribed to 5 channels for a specific topic, but I could be subscribed to 20 as well - I just can't find them naturally

A good recommendation algorithm might be worth paying for, as it could provide endless entertainment.

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

#13

Post by mIOAMDA » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 2:40 PM UTC

taldo wrote: post #6

mIOAMDA wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google video search does not recommend. You must make a search query. I'm talking about actual recommendations that you didn't explicitly search for which is where discoverability stems from.

So you intend to collect detailed view data to feed your model? Kind of like a browser extension spying on every video you watch anywhere, collecting detailed data about how you watch, etc? Don't count me in.

I'm thinking more about a website (Client) where you get the recommendations then if you click on one of the recommended videos (either by watching the embed or redirecting from the website) we'll assume that you liked it.

Outside of this website (client) you won't be tracked.

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

#14

Post by mandeepj » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 2:41 PM UTC

For best user experience centralized is the way to go. Imagine a video goes viral hosted on a shared server. Not a good experience for anyone. You could build a cache layer on top of it but then how will you reward the creator?

Are you expecting people setting up, and maintaining their own servers to host videos? Those times are gone. Content creators want to upload where millions of users are already present.

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

#15

Post by javajosh » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 2:42 PM UTC

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 thick-client application that manages your content, both serving it locally, but also putting it on various platforms. I think it could be a real winner if done right! You might even be able to give it away, open source it, if you can sell default space, like Mozilla does.

The obvious starting point for this product would be the content creation tool itself. I'm sure Adobe (and Apple!) would love it if this was a reality, just to stick it to Google. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, after all.

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

#16

Post by mIOAMDA » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 2:44 PM UTC

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…

What if instead we had the recommendations from the main sites YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion and if you want your personal video hosting site to be recommended you would fill in a form to add you sites to the collection of sites the recommendation system crawl through?

This might be helpful to avoid bad quality recommendations?

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

#17

Post by izacus » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 2:45 PM UTC

I think the key here is a deep misunderstanding where YTs value to creator is: It's not just recommendations, it's the fact that they take care of ad pipeline which ends up as pure revenue for the creator. Enabling monetization for videos is very simple on YT and you get a paycheck at the end.

Any competing platform needs to compete with this value proposition: you upload video, you get money.

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

#18

Post by mIOAMDA » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 2:46 PM UTC

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…

The goal is not necessarily to make self hosting easier. The goal is that if you're able to self-host than you could benefit from this recommendation platform by being discoverable. It's your hassle to be viewable the recommendation platform doesn't host anything.

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

#19

Post by mIOAMDA » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 2:48 PM UTC

mandeepj wrote: post #14

For best user experience centralized is the way to go. Imagine a video goes viral hosted on a shared server. Not a good experience for anyone. You could build a cache layer on top of it but then how will you reward the creator? Are you expecting people setting up, and maintaining their own servers to host videos? Those times are gone. Content creators want to upload where millions of users are already present.

No the idea is to just make the recommendation platform. There is no hosting going on. If though someone decides to self-host at least they'll be discoverable through the recommendation platform.

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

#20

Post by nemothekid » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 2:51 PM UTC

>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 people won't know where to find me."

Regardless, most Content Creators don't leave the platform because YouTube is/(was) the only platform paying people for content. While the type of content that is watched by tech professionals may do incredibly well with Patreon, that isn't true for several other types of content. This IMO, is why Facebook was unable to get people to create for FB Video (Unless you were a corporation that handled monetization already), it's a large reason why Vine creators complained about the platform and it's something Twitch and TikTok get right.

This, to me, is the real issue with starting a YouTube competitor. It's far easier to innovate on the format (Twitch = livestreams, TikTok = clips+ML), then it is to offer "video hosting" but "better". If you want creators to create for your platform, then you have to pay them, which means you either have to get advertisers (and deal with the same content cleanup YouTube does) or have people pay (and deal with that chicken and egg).

I believe Twitch was early enough to not have to go the "pay creators on day 1" route, bu Musical.ly (what eventually became TikTok), Mixxer, and Quibi all had to open their wallets and spend a ton on marketing and exclusives to get people on their platform (and two of them failed hard).