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Comment by lmz | Hacker News Reader

Serving requests is a feature of Youtube and if they don't want to serve your client... well you didn't pay for it anyway.

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They corned the market, drove everyone out of it, and are now rent-seeking. Can't say you have much of a choice between youtube and any other video provider that has the same content on it.

>They corned the market, drove everyone out of it, and are now rent-seeking.

It's almost dumping [1]: they gave a service away for free (even if they were losing a lot of money) just to make it unfeasible for any other company to start a competing service.

Vimeo could have been a competitor, but then they pivoted to a professional market and now that Bending Spoons bought them [2], I'm not sure they will even have a future.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy) [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197302

It is dumping. The whole YCombinator VC Silicon Valley model is entirely based on dumping. They call it "burning VC cash", which is an overly wordy synonym for it to muddy the waters, and it would be positive for the world if everyone installed a browser script that did a `s/burning vc cash/dumping` on all text elements.

The equivalent here is if Sony owned the most watched TV network (by far) and decided that it would work fully on Sony Bravia tvs. People with LG or Samsung TV's could only watch a degraded version.

We all pay plenty. Don't forget that every product you buy that advertises on YouTube forwards some of that money to YouTube, even if you then don't watch the ads. I would be happy to pay the same amount for everything, but somehow block vendors from spending any money on ads, if it were at all possible.

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