Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 75 posts

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

#31

Post by sct202 »

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…

And also text websites crash frequently when they go viral, it's going to be a bigger challenge for people to scale video going from thousands to views a day on their niche to a million if they make something that spreads.

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

#32

Post by antocv »

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. Put the number of flags next to the video, add the ability to not even see flagged videos.

And who would flag the bad users?

This just increases slightly the discomfort of bad guys, but does not prevent it at all. Instead they will flag competitive videos and such.

Nobody has solved "decentralized trust" yet, if ever.

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

#33

Post by caseyf7 »

mIOAMDA wrote: post #9
ghgr wrote: post #7

Interesting concept. So you propose to have a landing page with a selection of videos tailored to the taste of the visitor? And seamless combining results from YouTube, Vimeo and others? You would be effectively relegating YouTube to a commoditized CDN for videos. Again, interesting concept.

This is exactly my idea!

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.

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

#35

Post by terafo »

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…

>Videos can be large -- a 10 minute 4k video can be nearly 5gb in size.

Not on YouTube, with the way YouTube compresses video it's usually somewhere around 10 gigabytes for an hour of 4k@60 video.

>Then you need to bandwidth to actually serve all that data. Ideally you have servers geolocated close to the user.

I don't see any serious benefits from decreased latency, if we are talking about video streaming.

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

#36

Post by teucris »

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…

This mirrors my experience. My theory is that YouTube falsely equivocates a video’s relevance to you with your desire to receive notifications about it - e.g. whether you clicked the little ‘bell’ when subscribing. This isn’t what we expect - I personally go to my feed to sees what’s new, but that’s not what YouTube creates the feed for. I don’t know what it makes the feed for, honestly.

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

#37

Post by Aunche »

Videos from independent creators won't be able to go viral. Your viewership would be bounded by your network throughput. Even if you're already popular, a disproportionate number of your views will come as soon as you upload a video, so you would be end up paying for a lot of bandwidth you don't need.

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

#38

Post by pontus »

I like this idea. There are going to be a million reasons why it won't work that people will bring up, but ultimately I suspect they're all addressable.

One concern that would have to be addressed upfront would be to avoid having this turn into another Youtube. For example, once you have a great video aggregation site, there will be a desire to start hosting videos yourself. At that point you can start monetizing them and will inevitably want to promote that content, turning yourself into another Youtube. Basically once you control the demand, the supply side is easy to displace. I guess making it open source could address some of this.

Also, should definitely call it opentube.com (already taken of course, but surprisingly not in use).

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

#39

Post by asutekku »

terafo wrote: post #35
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…

> Videos can be large -- a 10 minute 4k video can be nearly 5gb in size. Not on YouTube, with the way YouTube compresses video it's usually somewhere around 10 gigabytes for an hour of 4k@60 video. > Then you need to bandwidth to actually serve all that data. Ideally you have servers geolocated close to the user. I don't see any serious benefits from decreased latency, if we are talking about video streaming.

Most users won't watch the video, if they need to wait for too long before it begins.

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

#40

Post by mIOAMDA »

pontus wrote: post #38

I like this idea. There are going to be a million reasons why it won't work that people will bring up, but ultimately I suspect they're all addressable. One concern that would have to be addressed upfront would be to avoid having this turn into another Youtube. For example, once you have a great video aggregation site, there will be a desire to start hosting videos yourself. At that point you can start monetizing the…

What about monetizing the recommendations themselves like some other commenters suggest. Would you pay for high quality recommendations?
Post reply on HN