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It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

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Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

#61
I'm pretty satisfied with YouTube as a viewer other than Firefox on Linux can always decode the ads, but not always the actual content (many other sites have this issue as well).

There's so much great content on YT for just about anything. Gardening, mechanics, computers, games, sports, you name it. It's all there.

Most other platforms are quite vapid. I suppose that's fine for the drooling masses, but I'm a quality of quantity person.

Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

#62
post #7

I always assumed YouTube’s technical foundations were significantly subsidized by the mothership, but I have no data to base that on other than looking at the $29bn/year revenue figure and wondering whether that amount of money would be enough to provision the amount of compute, storage and bandwidth that YouTube needs, plus all other expenses (including revenue sharing with uploaders). Yes, $29bn is a lot of money,…

When I worked at Google I definitely noticed that YouTube was great at (ab)using untracked or very cheap resources. They definitely get huge benifits of otherwise idle data centers in sleeping regions. As the regular service traffic died off YouTube would put those idle cores to work transcoding video. It is definitely the case that YouTube gets lots of really cheap compute by being part of Google. But that isn't a b…

“In our case, we developed a custom chip to transcode video, as well as software to coordinate these chips. And we put it all together to form our transcoding special brain – the Video (trans)Coding Unit (VCU). We’ve seen up to 20-33x improvements in compute efficiency compared to our previous optimized system, which was running software on traditional servers.”

https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/new-era-video-infrastruc...

Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

#63
YouTube has become horrible experience practically unwatchable unless you pay for the monthly Premium service. And this is coming from me a person who grew up watching TV stuffed with ads. I can't imagine with young people who never watched TV think of bare non-premium YouTube.

Non-premium YouTube is just an ad machine that happens to show some video content between ads. It used to be the opposite of that.

Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

#64
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the most obvious split would be AWS and then everything else. What does AWS have to do with Prime?

I'm poorly informed regarding breakups of this kind, and I don't have the experience/research to assess the infra costs of a streaming service like Prime video. Assuming the hosting costs are a significant portion of their expenditure, what would it look like in a breakup, what kind of deal would they be able to get from the newly spun off AWS?

There are lots of video streaming services that don't operate the bulk of their own infrastructure. They would simply become a customer of GCP, AWS, Azure, whatever.

Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

#65

For me, YouTube is the most effective ad sponsored service by far. Users are forced to watch at least 5 seconds of ads before watching any content. This 5 second window is very focused as there is no time to context switch to anything else. Contrast this with Google search - sure there are some ads at the top but these are easy to mentally filter out.

Cue uBlock origin - I don’t recall the last time I watched an injected ad on YouTube. Of course most content these days is peddling some product, or has a quick word from sponsors - but at least I don’t have to put up with unrelated ads in the middle of a stream.

It could be argued that the worst thing that happened to ads are targeted ads. The targeting part manages to insert irrelevant ads at the most inappropriate times, even after invading users' activity across the web. Even simple non-tracking ads like a word from the sponsor are sometimes relevant and manages to avoid invasive breaks.

Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

#66
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These hypothetical splits show the perils of having outsiders (including regulators) make decisions like these. Just some quick notes: > You don't need the retail arm any more [...] spin off the media company, comprising Audible and prime video, to make a Disney competitor The whole point of the conglomerate model they use (following Costco) is that the membership fee grants consumers access to a bevy of services. Th…

> The services may not work a la carte If the service cannot compete on it's own merits, and is being propped up by an unrelated business, how competetive is it actually?

What if it's not an independent service, merely a perk of the actual service?

Where do we draw the line? Should Apple be asked to spin off iCloud because email, photos, documents should all be independent services?

Note that neither Prime Video nor iCloud are monopolies, which would bring different considerations into the matter.

Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

#67

It's time for antitrust to hit Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon. At the very least. Amazon: AWS is one of the most valuable businesses ever created. You don't need the retail arm any more, now that it is enshitting itself. Also spin off the media company, comprising Audible and prime video, to make a Disney competitor. Amazon would absolutely be more valuable broken up. Meta: Meta has always run 3 separate products either…

Amazon doesn't have close to a monopoly with AWS, Prime Video or even its ecommerce.

What possible anti-trust rationale would there be to forcibly break up the company?

Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

#68
post #7

I always assumed YouTube’s technical foundations were significantly subsidized by the mothership, but I have no data to base that on other than looking at the $29bn/year revenue figure and wondering whether that amount of money would be enough to provision the amount of compute, storage and bandwidth that YouTube needs, plus all other expenses (including revenue sharing with uploaders). Yes, $29bn is a lot of money,…

When I worked at Google I definitely noticed that YouTube was great at (ab)using untracked or very cheap resources. They definitely get huge benifits of otherwise idle data centers in sleeping regions. As the regular service traffic died off YouTube would put those idle cores to work transcoding video. It is definitely the case that YouTube gets lots of really cheap compute by being part of Google. But that isn't a b…

You are basically making the case for the anti-trust case here. i.e. it is very hard for another company to compete without "free compute".

Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

#69
post #7

I always assumed YouTube’s technical foundations were significantly subsidized by the mothership, but I have no data to base that on other than looking at the $29bn/year revenue figure and wondering whether that amount of money would be enough to provision the amount of compute, storage and bandwidth that YouTube needs, plus all other expenses (including revenue sharing with uploaders). Yes, $29bn is a lot of money,…

When I worked at Google I definitely noticed that YouTube was great at (ab)using untracked or very cheap resources. They definitely get huge benifits of otherwise idle data centers in sleeping regions. As the regular service traffic died off YouTube would put those idle cores to work transcoding video. It is definitely the case that YouTube gets lots of really cheap compute by being part of Google. But that isn't a b…

If they spun out Youtube, then Google could sell access to idle data centers. Basically spot instances, or maybe you describe some task (with e.g. a docker container) and then GCP runs it at some point in the next 24 hours in some datacenter.

Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

#70
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cue uBlock origin - I don’t recall the last time I watched an injected ad on YouTube. Of course most content these days is peddling some product, or has a quick word from sponsors - but at least I don’t have to put up with unrelated ads in the middle of a stream.

And so the creators don't get paid when you watch their content. I pay for YouTube Premium. Creators get paid and I don't watch ads. We have a family plan so this applies to the whole family. We spend way more time watching YouTube than Netflix but pay for both.

Echoing this, a YT premium subscription feels like a proper transaction.
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