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

It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 348 posts

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

#201

Post by ramphastidae »

echelon wrote: post #155
jeffwask wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the chatgpt garbagisation of the web Eh... it's already started on YouTube. There's a whole new genre of movie content that has chatgpt summarize the movie while they play 15 minutes of clips. It's higher effort garbagisation because someone needs to at least do some low effort video editing.

Full video automation is not going to take long. I'm working on systems to automate 100% of video workflows (in a good way). We recently launched a 24/7 news channel: https://fakeyou.com/news

Doesn’t seem to be working?

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

#202

Post by lotsofpulp »

scarface_74 wrote: post #176
rescbr wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like AWS and Azure, chances are GCP/Google's internal hardware division bills internal teams similarly to external customers (especially as Sundar continues to demand cost cuts) Having worked on such large conglomerates it’s closer to friends & family discount than from large external company discount. There’s also transfer pricing and other accounting ways to improve numbers. This is so widespread that one such co…

That's simple Managerial Accounting 101. Every major company operates the same way. When Disney+ "buys" the right to stream the latest Marvel movie from Marvel Studios, the company as a whole has to back out the revenue so not to count it twice. But still show Disney+'s profit.

Why would they have to “back out” revenue”? Revenue for one department has to be an expense for another if they are buying and selling from each other, and that would cancel out in the company wide financials.

Disney+ buying from or selling to Marvel would not show up as profit or loss for Disney.

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

#203

Post by JohnFen »

PixelForg wrote: post #153
peoplefromibiza wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And so the creators don't get paid when you watch their content. They could ask the users to pay for the content they produce and measure how many microseconds would pass before they switch to someone else's videos. It's an option. I don't want to watch ads, I skip sponsored sections, I feel no guilt about it, if they can't monetize enough and have to shutdown operations, I can survive without that content. What wo…

Your analogy is only correct if you watch content that's recommended to you, but many of us actively watch YouTubers we have subscribed to, in that case it makes sense for the creators to get paid then. Edit - Edited the comment a bit

95% of what I watch on YouTube is from YouTubers I actively subscribe to. I rarely use YouTube's recommendations (in no small part because YouTube is bad at recommendations for me).

I'm very happy to support the ones I follow who are doing it for a living. For most, I consider their cut of my Premium fee to be sufficient. For some, I go beyond by giving them money through Patreon and the like, or buying their swag.

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

#204

Post by scarface_74 »

Retric wrote: post #189
scarface_74 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, you're kind of making my point. Absolutely nothing came of the DOJ case with regards to IE bundling. But that still isn't logical. Are you really going to say that a company shouldn't be allowed to use resources to create a new product? Should it have been illegal for Netflix to use profits from shipping DVDs to later bundle video streaming? Should it also be illegal for companies to "subsidize" open source…

Microsoft lost. They avoided being broken up, but it’s absolutely clear they had broken the law. It’s not IE bundling alone that was at issue but Microsoft making it harder to install competitors and limiting access to some API’s to IE. They where legally required to change this and did in fact do so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor... And the critical thing you don’t seem to understand i…

Microsoft did not in fact have to change anything about bundling the browser with Windows.

And just in case you haven't noticed, Intel isn't exactly doing great against AMD these days and doesn't even have a monopoly on chips with the x86 instruction set.

Do you think its also illegal for the cable companies that originally lost money on cable infrastructure and to subsidize the cable infrastructure to sell subscription content? DirecTV probably wouldn't have made money selling satellite internet. But it was able to do it cheaply because of its content delivery. Every company leverages its resources to have margins of scale.

Even HN can only exist as a free service because it leverages the resources it has from the rest of its business. No one pays dang to moderate HN. The moderation is subsidized.

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

#205

Post by JohnFen »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #74
pclmulqdq wrote: post #2

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…

> Meta: Meta has always run 3 separate products either way. Spinning off the loser (Facebook), and the non-social networking product (WhatsApp) You don't think of it as a social networking product, but it is used as such. I consider Discord social media, and WhatsApp is honestly a text only Discord competitor in the grand scheme of things, all the group chats are reminiscent of Discord servers, but for people who don…

I've never thought of WhatsApp as a social networking product. For me, it's just an SMS replacement necessary to talk to my friends outside of the US.

Not saying my perspective is correct, but I think of a "social networking" product as one where I'm talking to groups of people. That's not how I use WhatsApp. That's always 1-on-1 conversations with people I know in the real world.

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

#206

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

scarface_74 wrote: post #165
WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Preferentially giving YouTube access to ressources is indeed an anti-competitive action. That’s part of the vertical restraint kind. YT isn’t a monopoly however. It might be dominant depending of how you define the markets but it does have competitors.

That's not in any sense of the word how anti-trust works. That's just like saying that car manufacturers can't use idle capacity to help start a new line of vehicles just because a new car manufacturer couldn't create a new car line.

No, it’s not comparable in any ways. Car manufacturers sell cars. That’s their main business.

Here we have Google using its dominant position in another market to prop up another activity through an advantage. That’s most definitely fall under anti-competitive law at least in Europe (I don’t care about the US. The modern interpretation of American antitrust laws is a complete joke).

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

#207

Post by JohnFen »

echelon wrote: post #173
EForEndeavour wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean "in a good way"? How do you control whether someone using your video workflow automation uses it for good (whatever that is) or not?

How does Adobe assure this? Or any tool maker? Email has problems, yet the good and productive uses vastly outweigh the bad actors. The vast majority of systems humans use have benefit, otherwise they would be unwound by governments (eg. crypto). People want to be creative more than they want to be destructive. The destroyers will be moderated, just as they are in every system. I want a world where every kid can make…

That's all well and good, but the question still stands -- what do you mean by "in a good way"? What differentiates a "good way" from a "bad way"?

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

#208

Post by arcticfox »

JohnFen wrote: post #199
xhkkffbf wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, I've been seeing more and more videos that were clearly tossed together by some algorithm using a synthetic voice. The text may even be largely written by an AI and then proofed by a human. They use the same clips again and again, almost in rotation. I think they're slowly going to drown out the good producers.

Those synthetic voices drive me insane. Nothing makes me stop watching a video faster.

The TikTok woman voice is so grating it's oddly fascinating. It might be the most annoying voice I've ever heard but yet...

edit: TIL it's a real person and she (can) sound exactly like the TTS version... I'm cracking up listening to her. Thank goodness it's something she can turn on and off.

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

#209

Post by mustacheemperor »

echelon wrote: post #155
jeffwask wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the chatgpt garbagisation of the web Eh... it's already started on YouTube. There's a whole new genre of movie content that has chatgpt summarize the movie while they play 15 minutes of clips. It's higher effort garbagisation because someone needs to at least do some low effort video editing.

Full video automation is not going to take long. I'm working on systems to automate 100% of video workflows (in a good way). We recently launched a 24/7 news channel: https://fakeyou.com/news

I just tried to check out your 24/7 news channel and it is currently a twitch stream of a windows desktop wallpaper.

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

#210

Post by favourable »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #17
osigurdson wrote: post #14

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.

> Cue uBlock origin

uBo doesn't work everywhere. I do have it installed on Firefox for Android though.

Post reply on HN