I'm surprised why I haven't seen a new incumbent in the video space in over 5 years.
2. Getting users is a challenge. Why would users flock to a platform with few videos?
3. Getting rid of content is a challenge. How do you filter out the stuff you don’t want on your platform (copyrighted material, child pornography, terrorist propaganda, etc)?
4. You’ll bleed money until you have lots of users, possibly even after that.
Also, given that you mention Netflix: both Apple and Disney entered the market recently (for Apple, I think the jury is still out, but they have deep pockets, so they may not be in too much of a hurry to become profitable); Disney, with its enormous catalog, couldn’t go wrong, I think)
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/Develope...
The document makes it look much harder than it really is. It really should be a matter of "upload video to S3" and then "run a script" and a while later it is loaded in the CDN and good to go.
The deal breaker for most people would be the cost, something like 0.10 per GB downloaded, with reasonable quality that would be $0.10 for an hour of video.
If YouTube didn't exist it would be an easy sell: compare that to cable where a person with a serious TV habit might watch 200 hours of TV a month and pay $80, that is 40 cents per hour including both the content and the distribution network.
It would be a weekend project to make a web site that ordinary people could upload video that would pipe it through that script into the Cloudfront CDN.
If it were to turn into a hit you would run into two problems: (1) costs for bandwidth, storage and compute and (2) illegal and otherwise troublesome content.
The AMZN price is a sustainable price, they are making a healthy profit, they aren't going to be in a hurry to discontinue the service. (Use "unlimited" bandwidth at a cheap web host and you might get a call where they explain that it as "unlimited" as an "unlimited" cell phone plan.)
You could pay less but you will be spending your time, spending money up front, etc.
You are now dealing with problem (2). That includes: pirate content, beheading videos, incitement to violence, slander, fraud, privacy violations, "fake news", child pornography, other pornography, innocent people accused of posting videos of the above sorts, etc.
Google has lawyers who have gotten a favorable deal with the content industry. That's the easy part. If you go about it with any sense of "justice" or "fairness" the content moderation job can destroy your mental health through this mechanism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_injury
You either take a "delete them all and let [God] sort them out attitude" or you pay somebody else to do it.
Why are there no new Netflix like competitors? Like Hulu, HBO, Disney, etc...
Or, why are there no YouTube competitors? Like PeerTube, BitChute, TikTok, etc...
On YouTube competitors again the same applies, PeerTube, BitChute, and TikTok don't allow you make money on their platform.