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Comment by tanilama | Hacker News Reader

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tanilama

Never was, and probably won't be there for a long time.

If you wish to compete with Youtube, consider a feature match of the followings:

1. Fast streaming, everywhere, on phones and browsers.

2. Super High resolution videos.

3. Huge content reserves.

4. Good search and discovery experience.

5. The ability to battle spams and handle external copyright claim to avoid lawsuit.

6. Robust ad platform and sales and the infrastructure to sustain operations.

Youtube has achieved this because they are part of Google, they enjoy all kinds of technological advantage: Storage/Serving/Spam filtering/Video encoding/Machine Learning, and years and years of accumulation of data, losing billions of dollars while getting constant cash injection from Google.

It is hard to replicate Youtube, heck, even Chinese doesn't succeed to copy one of their own. None of the video streaming websites in China is exactly the model of Youtube.

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"1. Fast streaming, everywhere, on phones and browsers" and "4. Good search and discovery experience" are the essentials (with 1 including the hosting requirements). Most users are ready to put up with moderate resolution videos, the content will accumulate surprisingly quickly as long as there is some initial content to draw people in, and it'll be good news for the platform when spam and copyright issues become actual problems. But feature 1 is big enough in cost and difficulty, to be a big barrier to entry by itself.

> 5. The ability to battle spams and handle external copyright claim to avoid lawsuit.

That's also vital. Otherwise you're risking your entire platform on lawsuits from film and music companies when copyrighted content is inevitably uploaded.

As I mentioned in the comment, this is sort of a "good" problem to have, in that both spammers and copyright claims look for popular, well-known services to focus their efforts on. The problems will definitely exist at small scales too, but compared to the other difficulties mentioned, these are much smaller concerns initially.

You forgot the biggest one.

8. An ability to pay for bandwith costs without going broke as soon as your service starts to grow.

I think YT is in a unique position where the scale of your service has to be massive before your costs become manageable. This reason for this is b/c you need to operate as a network peer and have the ability to do edge caching. The vast majority of players in this space and startups simply cannot compete on that level.

Amazon could easily compete. They could transform Twitch into a more general purpose video platform.

I don't necessarily think one needs to replace youtube by brute force. It mostly offers cheap disposable entertainment and that's not so hard to come by. Noted I'm probably not their main target audience.

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