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Comment by enitihas | Hacker News Reader

> Imagine if Alphabet was broken up, Google search can still afford to run a research lab, as can youtube.

It is far more likely that YouTube will go bankrupt, since running a free video service where videos are almost infinite and cache hits much lower is very costly. Couple that with all the other advantages of being with Google like access to talent and infra, I don't see YouTube surviving with Google. It's possible that the tab will be picked up by Facebook video, and that is an even worse platform and more closed.

I don't see a cheap way of solving the YouTube problem. (Yes P2P exists but has too many problems like battery consumption on phones and NAT).

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That would be fantastic tho, we would have an influx of startups competing in the video space, since they don’t have to compete with youtube being artificially propped up by a completely unrelated business model

Yeah, startups aren't going to magically make things cheaper than YouTube. So if any startups arise, they would follow a paid model most likely.

Now that might be fantastic depending on where you come from. If you have disposable income, it is a huge win to have a non ad supported video platform which might even be more privacy protecting. If you are a poor kid using YouTube to watch MIT OCW and khan academy and innumerable other resources, well you are screwed.

If you are a poor kid, you upload your interpretation of a Bach piece and get slammed by an injust, extralegal pseudo-copyright mechanism, that’s in essence an attack on human culture..

MIT and Khan Academy could easily host their content using BitTorrent and reduce their bandwidth usage by 95% ( https://nrkbeta.no/2008/03/02/thoughts-on-bittorrent-distrib... )

Why do you think that a dozen of startups in the space remaining after a possible youtube demise won't be burdened by the same policies? I think that the copyright lobby would try their best to tighten their control at a time when a huge corp stopped throwing its weight against them.

What youtube gives to the poor kid is instant and free access to a huge audience. Yes, it's comes with an (admittedly not really high) risk of a false positive and blocking for copyright reasons. I suppose the kid is smart enough to also have copies of the performance on other services, and safely stored locally.

Oh, they absolutely would! Every music streaming service is already beholden to a tiny record industry cartel, even though there are a number of music streaming services.

But it’s simple, video is more versatile, and by removing youtube’s monolithic dominance, you remove the single point of failure that copyright cartels have been able to attack.

As an example, imagine a separate youtube-clone dedicated to education that was actually willing to fight for fair use! Or a youtube that didn’t automatically demonetized you for swearing.

Internet already gives these kids (and the rest of us) both access and audience, we have just been stupid enough to lock large parts of our cultural heritage into corporate silos, protected by “intellectual property”-laws. Competition wouldn’t solve this completely, but it would make it harder to distort the market.

That's basically what PeerTube tries to do. It doesn't work well in practice for most people and organizations that try it because most videos only have 0-1 watchers at a time.

Yeah, exactly. Because they have to compete with a behemoth subsidized by an invasive advertising company..

Thanks @cannabis_sam, never thought of this but yes absolutely. The tech is slowly getting there... but innovation would speed up a lot more if there was a significant enough pain (and therefore significant enough upside).

What are you talking about?

I'm talking about being competition to an entity like YouTube which is funded by an internet advertising behemoth. Is that what you're talking about?

YouTube can afford to offer a lot of value to the customer, much more than it would have been able to sustain by itself without the Google support.

Without offering all that value, definitionally, Youtube would not be as attractive to consumers.

Therefore consumers would be more likely to choose other alternatives like PeerTube

Therefore projects like PeerTube would have more support and therefore would develop more quickly.

I think YouTube fits in perfectly with Google. It allows them to offer another medium of advertisement (video) to their customers. If YouTube was split off, both creator earnings and YouTube earnings would fall through the floor because the ads wouldn't be worth so much without Google's targeting algorithm behind it.

An unrelated company to their business model is something like Waymo

Netflix made it and proved a market for paid streaming services. Google has bungled this again and again and is currently in the middle of pitting its ad revenue against its top content creators which will only wind up killing both. They've already demolished their recommendation algorithm in favour of just showing repeats of what you just watched so they can cover their ass. Creators are still using 3rd party services to get paid since almost anything can get you demonitized nowadays. Giant channels like JRE are jumping ship. Nobody wants to pay for YouTube Premium if all they're going to do is kick the legs out from under all the worthwhile channels and turn the service into Cable TV 2.0. All this means they've got much bigger problems than paying for storage and delivery.

Netflix and YouTube are not even remotely comparable. The vast majority of Netflix traffic can fit into hardware appliances installed on ISPs, or in the cache of Netflix DCs, since the tail is very small. Plus Netflix is very expensive outside of the developed world in terms of PPP, whereas YouTube is free for even the poorest.

They have got problems, yes , but there is far too much good content on youtube with a very very long tail. In lockdown, I have tried almost dozens of different cooking channels for different things. It is the magic of YouTube that so many people are able to take their content to so many viewers seamlessly at no cost or loss of convenience to them.

I agree that there is no _free_ way of solving the YouTube problem. As for cheapness? We don't yet know what the space looks like because YouTube kills off its competitors by undercutting them preemptively. If we hadn't had YouTube all these years, by now there's at least a possibility that other approaches (ad-driven, subscription-driven, etc.) would have been explored for low-cost user-generated content, and we'd have a better idea of what the actual cost is, as opposed to this bifurcated monopoly between the networks providing professionally-produced content (including burgeoning streaming services) and YouTube capturing the remaining content.

It seems a competitor like Dailymotion was able to survive on its own, bar YouTube competition. I m not sure its viable with it, but without google it seemed profitable.

Eh, another venture-backed story with no road to profitability, handed off between various acquisitions and allowed to bleed money in the hopes of drawing business.

were you talking about facebook, youtube, google or dailymotion?

In this case, I was lumping dailymotion in with the others you mention.

Google makes a $15B a year from YouTube.

That pays for a lot of storage. And storage is very cheap at that scale.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2...

Cost of streaming videos is not storage, it's dominated by bandwidth. Bandwidth is expensive when you can't cache videos the way Netflix does.

a) Google doesn't pay for bandwidth. They have peering agreements because of all the dark fiber they bought (https://www.lightreading.com/optical/dwdm/google-dark-fiber-...)

This isn't exclusive to Google though - most large bandwidth users have peering agreements.

b) Google does have edge caches[1]. It's true that the long tail of YouTube videos is longer than Netflix, but since Google doesn't pay for traffic (see (a)) this only affects speed, not cost.

[1] https://peering.google.com/#/infrastructure

I would argue that in a system where the content is "almost infinite" the average value of each content item is "almost zero". Cache hits stats could be interesting to see what percentage of the content is never watched.

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