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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?

#21

Post by tylerdinner »

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…

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 to add the script to their own site, but adding analytics scripts is common practice.

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

#23

Post by tylerdinner »

vemv wrote: post #12

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…

I feel like the rise of channel subscriptions has caused the recommendation algorithm to act like a dog chasing its tail. You get so silo'd with content on youtube reccs these days, it's really sad.

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

#24

Post by mtnGoat »

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…

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.

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

#25

Post by jasode »

tylerdinner wrote: post #21
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…

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 bunch of coronavirus deniers falsely flag that video as "child pornography".

Game theory is hard and everybody has to think through all the future chess moves that adversaries will use.

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

#27

Post by ryandrake »

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 to make a buck. I have TV for that. I want to see silly cat videos and how-tos from people's garages.

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

#28

Post by blablabla123 »

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…

It's probably easier to start with a niche since there are many types of videos hosted on YouTube that differ a lot in the way and intention they were created. For instance shows created for YouTube are completely different from videos that exist independently from YouTube and have been uploaded there. Personally I rarely watch videos from the first group but at the same time I find it hard to discover entertaining content although I subscribed to a lot of channels. Tech talks I find good to discover though, the recommendations for that work really well I think.

Of course YouTube has gone a long way and is a well working compromise for most formats...

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

#29

Post by DoctorOW »

mtnGoat wrote: post #24
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…

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. markups. They'd also have significantly less advertising income than Google. Plus, many of the professional content creators wouldn't even consider a platform that doesn't pay out ad revenue.

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