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Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

No one does video even remotely close to the scale YT does it. YT has by far the deepest market penetration (close to 3 billion monthly users), and has by far the most hosted content, and critically, youtube adds over a half-million hours of video a day.

Essentially, youtube adds more video every single day than the entirety of every other streaming service offers combined.

Youtube is in it's own category, and it's unsurprising no else wants to touch it.

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Counted in number of hours watched, I'm pretty sure that Netflix, cable TV and satellite TV, can compete with YouTube.

But everybody has to start somewhere. Would it be impossible for Netflix to start adding for example 100 000 hours of user generated video per day?

Would it be practical and economical is the right question to ask.

Providers would be more than happy to sell Netflix the build out

Serving user generated content is very expensive in terms of infrastructure. More expensive in many ways than streaming studio generated content.

The scales of the two models are very different. Ingesting content is more complicated with user generated content because there's few guarantees about formats (encoding, color, file formats). Serving the content is also more complicated because it's not as friendly to edge caches as studio content. Part of the expense of YouTube is the long tail of content. Popular content might live in edge caches but YouTube serves up old unpopular stuff too.

Those things do not sound like a very big hurdle for a massive company like Netflix, in my opinion. They could simply demand a certain encoding, color and file format from uploaders. As for edge caching, not my specialty, but if Google can do it so could probably Netflix.

The most difficult part, and one that Youtube has struggled with since the beginning, would be content moderation. It's a technical, legal, and PR nightmare and there's no reason for Netflix to wade into that mess.

Then why is there reason for YouTube to be in that mess? Netflix currently has no problem in broadcasting and selling some of the vilest and most offensive stuff imaginable, including outright child pornography.

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