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You are just doing YouTube without the advantage of having to use YouTube's infrastructure. You'll still have a central authority deciding what to recommend and whatnot. The main issue with YouTube is not the fact that they host the content, it's that they also decide what gets shown and to whom.
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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…
>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…
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 sorting.
The true challenge is in customer acquisition. Google has such a strong hold on the browser market [1], that there is just no way to convince people to "go to pex" and search for videos. You can see it with DDG which after more a decade its penetration [2] is a fraction of Google's. Even Microsoft, that plunged billions of dollars into Bing is not able to acquire more than just few % of the market [3].
Finally, there are literally no investors to back this. After the fall of Blekko [4], nobody will touch this market. We spoke to dozens of investors. Most have a default position to "never compete with Google".
Up until this doesn't change, there is no way to bring it to the market.
[0] https://pex.com
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/1/21310591/apple-google-sear...
[2] https://duckduckgo.com/traffic
Content creators probably don't want to host the videos themselves. Apart from YouTube, what is there? Dailymotion? Vimeo?
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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.
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.
>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…
But calculating the fingerprints of the videos rather than store on disk and serve all the exabytes video means you're still at a fundamental _information_ disadvantage.
You already know the following but I'll spell it out for readers who may not see the distinction: web surfers don't watch fingerprints... they watch the actual video bytes.
Youtube employees and researchers found out that user behavior such as actual watch time of the videos was a _stronger_ voting signal of quality than the user hitting the subscribe button. To replicate that measurement, how would Pex get similar usage data without actually storing the exabytes of videos or convincing millions of web surfers to install a browser plugin to spy on their youtube usage?
>The true challenge is in customer acquisition. Google has such a strong hold on the browser market [1], that there is just no way to convince people to "go to pex" and search for videos.
I'm not convinced of your claim that the Chrome browser is the competitive moat that prevents Pex from rising up. E.g. Tik Tok got very popular without Chrome browser help. As another example, I found out that a gardening expert[1] gets most of her views from Facebook-hosted videos instead of Youtube. She gets more than 3x the views on Facebook. I don't have a Facebook account so I watch her on Youtube but it turns out I'm actually in the minority of her audience.
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> 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.