Ask HN: What would be involved in building your own YouTube clone?

Start with a way to distribute video content as cost effectively as you can. CDN and transfer will be your most expensive cost factors.

Take into account that you might need to have signed URLs for specific users in order to comply with content distribution rights.

Once you have decided a CDN/traffic partner you need to tailor your software to it and it will become the most crucial and expensive technical debt you'll have.

Since web browsers now have such excellent support for video codecs, you really only need to receive the files and maybe re-encode them to the most well supported format..

HTML has the tag so you literally just link to that from your html, you don't need to "build a video player", browsers come with that already. And the data transport is just HTTP or HTTPS if you want to get fancy..

Everything else is the ops related, and is where it gets difficult.. Actually, it only gets difficult if your platform succeeds, but then it becomes majorly expensive and difficult.. Then you have to manage instances all around the world, probably negotiate with ISPs to place caches inside their datacenters, manage infrastructure to distribute videos on demand, manage abuse (harmful/illegal content) and oh my god it'd be a major pain and challenge,.

Shameless plug, I wrote a minimalistic audio-player, it's basically the same thing, except I didn't use the tag.. Look at the server, there's pretty much nothing there except a bit of plumbing to query a sql database. https://github.com/DusteDdk/dstream

Especially the larger you scale, the less this becomes a technical problem, and more of a 'how will people abuse this' problem.

Second hardest part? Paying for it. Streaming 1080 streams can get expensive. especially if it's unpaid. Costs grow exponentially with video quality. 4k is significantly more bandwidth.

there's tons of ways to stream video to people. that's the easy part.

Yes, that's why you haven't heard of them.

They fail before they get big enough to be popular.

File sharing platforms - defined broadly enough to include Youtube - will attract adversaries with asymmetric incentives.

It will be easy for people trying to upload illegal content to upload illegal content to the degree you make it easy for people to upload content. [1]

When your file sharing server starts serving child-pornography - and it will - law enforcement will contact you and your best option will be shutting down.

You will never get to the point where radicalization videos are the problem.

[1]: What is illegal depends on which legal jurisdiction. What can legally be said about Atatürk is different in Turkey than Mexico. Libel in the UK is more broad than the US. Pictures of naked humans engaged in activity vary in legality around the world.

Tumblr