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Comment by dgellow | Hacker News Reader

Business idea: videos creators pay $$ per month for a service to constantly scrap their videos from youtube as a backup system. If youtube delete your channel, in one click you can recreate it and reupload everything to another platform (or an alternative channel, whatever)

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Presumably the creators already have their videos, since they uploaded them to youtube in the first place. Hopefully they don't delete their own copies and rely on Google to safeguard them, though!

Video files are one part of the data you lose, but you also have metadata, such as title, description, etc.

How about the community you lost due to a fake copyright claim or policy claim? Friends, followers, messages, ...

We desperately truly worldwide, encompassing, independent, standardized-so-that-anyone-can-communicatio-to-everyone p2p social networks. Social network providers should have only the role of any service provider, so you can change them on a daily basis with no repercusions, just as you can freely change your tailor, barber, news provider or internet provider.

Maybe. If "live Streaming" something I suspect the user isn't keeping a copy.

Serious question: are there any legal impediments to importing or mirroring an entire channel from youtube to other platforms?

Because I wouldn't be surprised to see YouTube or certain creators objecting to this.

Not if the person requesting the videos be scraped is the person responsible for making the videos in the first place. If I decide to move my own channel's videos off YouTube, YouTube doesn't exactly have the right to argue otherwise.

And even if the new site/service doesn't get permission, YouTube generally doesn't come into the picture. It'd be a copyright issue between the service/person using it and the channel creator.

This is the big question. I have seen it done, but definitely there are things that can change when a certain scale is reach.

Basically the idea would be something similar to Anchor.

It would be awesome, and I have a huge network of creators ready to use this product when available. Email me at joakim(at) matchmade.tv if you're interested in developing this.

I haven’t done it myself because I except users to be mostly people with the worst content (either illegal or awful in other ways), and I personally don’t want to deal with them.

Though I’m interested to have your opinion on this. My email is easy to find through my profile.

Also, anyone reading this, please feel free to take the idea and implement it if you think there is something interesting to do here.

I think there is definitely something here. If you look at some recent trends:

1. Past few years have seen a huge growth in new content distribution networks, which are trying to lure creators to rehost their content in their platforms. Usually these are "internet-tv" channels that come automatically offered by TV providers nowadays

2. This constant stream of high profile cases where people lose livelihoods because of reliance on a single platform

3. The massive increase in mature and professional youtubers in the past 10 years.

4. Lowering costs in storage and bandwith

Combining these all it seems to be clear there is some kind of viable business in some kind of "Anchor of video distribution" for lack of better phrasing.

This would be a neat idea, but cancel culture would merely start targeting these platforms as well.

I don’t have a solution to cancel culture, but YouTube is already deleting stuff around by itself without people even asking for it to be removed. I would think there is a demand for backups of uploaded content, but don’t take my words for it :)

In almost all cases, I'd bet some human did ask for this content to be removed.

Either a copyright claim, or a user hitting 'report', or a takedown request, etc.

While a great business idea, you can also use youtube-dl to backup your youtube videos locally.

Ideally you don't do this, but rather just keep the video that you uploaded in the first place. Obviously you can't do this retroactively if you haven't already been doing it, but it's preferable from a quality and time perspective these days considering that in addition to the extra compression, most videos now are being packaged and delivered as a zillion HLS/DASH segments that youtube-dl has to fetch and reassemble.

YouTube also lets creators download (sub-1080p) MP4s of their originally uploaded video, and Google Takeout will also archive all your videos this way, but of course this is assumes your channel was not recently deleted.

Does YouTube allow you access to your mezzanine originals if they delete your channel? They should, and it takes the sting out a bit if so. If not, monsters.

I'm not sure, having thankfully never had a channel deleted. That said, even with an account in good standing, the download you have access to is not the mezzanine original, but an mp4 that tops out at HD, even if you originally uploaded a 4K file.

Youtube-dl can download 4k videos from youtube, but they won't be the original encode you uploaded.

Sure, I'm just describing a nice web interface on top of youtube-dl. Someone could do it quite quickly IMHO.

- daily scheduler for downloads, pay more for more frequent backups

- simple web interface to manage your account

- system to upload your backup to somewhere else

So basically 3 components for a simple MVP that can be done on top of any cloud provider.

Depending on the channel, this could be terabytes of content.

You can specify clear limits on how much content you will save per user. Or ask for more money for people with huge amount of videos.

When that dude stops updating his tool it'll truely be the end of days.

If I get the guy from the originally posted video right, he uses services that do exactly that (+ also directly publish the content on their platform). And it sounds like they do it for free, to get content on their platform.

Use the same short links, too.

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