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Comment by frereubu | Hacker News Reader

When I see a comment on HN that says someone "just" needs to do something I always wince. There are so many things to consider here, even if universities weren't the bureaucratic labyrinth that they are. Quite apart from the discovery aspect of being on YouTube, where people already on YouTube are much more likely to stumble across Cornell videos when using certain search terms, it wouldn't "just" be spinning up a single server - it would involve all sorts of stuff like encoding videos, bandwidth detection, load balancing etc. etc. I'm not saying this might not be a good thing to do, particularly as a backup if their YouTube channel gets taken down for some reason, but it's almost never as simple as "just" doing something. I'd encourage anyone who catches themselves writing "just" in a sentence to have a deeper think about why a person or organisation isn't doing that.

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Is there white-label open source (i.e. host it yourself) video hosting services like Vimeo / Mux / YouTube / NetFlix? The closest I found was NodeTube but I think it would need a UX/UI redesign before govts or universities would be ready to deploy it on their own.

Fwiw, universities have long paid for their own white label YouTube clones from various companies; at a bare minimum Canvas has been around forever. It just wasn't free (as in beer or otherwise).

There's peertube [0], which was built to defend against arbitrary censorship.

> PeerTube aspires to be a decentralized and free/libre alternative to video broadcasting services.

> [...]

> Anyone with a modicum of technical skills can host a PeerTube server, aka an instance. Each instance hosts its users and their videos. In this way, every instance is created, moderated and maintained independently by various administrators.

[0] https://joinpeertube.org/

There's Odysee based on LBRY, but I don't know if LBRY is here to stay. It's hard to tell with new Blockchains like that. I have to imagine running a node is expensive too.

[1]: https://odysee.com/

[2]: https://lbry.com/

My issue is that there was a time when it was a lot closer to "just" than it is now. I agree it's always more complex than we realize. But what frustrates me is that that almost has become a justification (pun) to justify (pun) not spending the effort to make it so that can be "just".

None of that is difficult, especially for a University, sorry.

What exactly do you mean? Say the university hired you to do the job, I assume you have a budget & headcount ready?

For a fileshare? What exactly is the challenge here? Bandwidth might be, but most colleges probably have a pretty solid fiber connection.

Have you worked in a university before, in a capacity where you had to get something like that signed off?

I've worked for university sized companies. I'm not sure why setting up a fileshare would be difficult. What's to sign off on? Space and a couple VMs? Red tape aside, I don't see the challenge.

I don't say this sarcastically, genuinely, but when you've worked in a university I imagine you'd have a very different view of something like this. I've worked in three - all in the UK, so I suppose that might make a difference - and the bureaucracy can be positively Byzantine. On top of just getting approval for the service, which could involve you in meetings where people split hairs to the point you're having conversations about semantics that would make Wittengstien weep, you now have to persuade a whole load of different departments to use your internal service over just them sticking their own stuff on YouTube. A university isn't a single, cohesive organisation, it's a collective of disparate organisational units, all with different agendas, and each of those organisational units has it's own internal struggles. It gets very political - in the broadest sense.

Well if your reasoning is that you can only ever use YouTube because you can only ever use YouTube then I guess you can only ever use YouTube.

> Have you worked in a university before, in a capacity where you had to get something like that signed off?

Bureaucracy isn’t a compelling excuse - that’s just an easy way to dismiss anything.

Universities have absolutely managed more complex IT change than hosting a few videos on their website.

But we are going to complain that a universities videos got taken down because of YouTube bureaucracy but universities can’t host their own videos because of their own internal bureaucracy then I have very little pity!

That’s even more true for american high profile university and their deep pockets.

They likely already have datacenters and high bandwidth internet connections (multiple).

Oh and they also have staff already on the payroll, and likely capable students that could lend a hand as a part time job or something.

Not to mention, the role of big corporations could be reduced to cdn only, for example (tink of google cdn, cloudfront or cloudflare).

It just take willingness to actually address the problem.

My thoughts exactly. The systems already probably exist for easily creating and deploying VMs, identity management, etc. In 2022 that's pretty turnkey stuff for a University.

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