Don’t forget Pornhub. If they spun off a non-porn-centric version of their platform, they might be able to take a substantial market share, given their existing infrastructure. And as a bonus, they already have creator monetization tools.
Same drumbeat before every video.
No make the last beat different so you can’t tell immediately.
So it’s approximated that YouTube currently has over 1 Exabyte of data stored (1,024 Petabytes, or 1,048,576 TB). A single 1080p stream is about 5Mbps and a minute of 1080p video takes about 20MB (all approximations).
Assuming those above values:
- Cost to store the data (assuming we’re going janky here) would cost at least $15 million (I’m under cutting this)
- Bandwidth required to stream 1000x 1080p videos at the same time (YT does orders of magnitude more): 5Gbps you’re looking in the tens-of-thousands if you want to be reliable or use a CDN
The long and short of it: it’s not cheap. If you only had a handful of videos and were streaming it to a limited set of people, it’s more manageable, but once you get to scale, it gets expensive quick.
The long and short of it: it’s not cheap.
True, but not the key point. If it were merely expensive then more companies would do it.
The issue here is that allowing anyone to upload a video and then serving it to literally anyone else, for free, is not a viable business model. You have to stuff it with ads to even come close to solvency and even then people fight back with ad blockers. I’m sure they experimented with embedding ads directly into the video stream by now and determined it’s not currently a good idea, but I think it’s coming.
The point here is that I’m not even sure YouTube makes much of a profit (if any) . There’s no money to be made with this model which is why YouTube has nearly no competition.
People brought up pornhub. Have you tried using that without an ad blocker (even with an ad blocker they have to keep getting around it to force ads on you)? That’s what you have to become to actually money with this model.
How would embedding help them if Sponsorblock already skips embedded sponsor ads from the creators? This seems like just an additional category for Sponsorblock.
It would inject the ads directly into the video stream like how Twitch does it currently. It wouldn’t register as an advertisement for any blocking software to handle it without blocking the video you were trying to watch.
Sponsor Block works because users flag the section of video that the creators edit into their own videos so it can be autoskipped by others with the addon installed.
Couldn’t tik tok compete with you tube?
tick tock is a privacy nightmare
Yep but irrelevant to what op is asking. There is a need to break YouTube’s monopoly
No there isn’t. Peertube won’t ever catch on. It doesn’t make sense like Lemmy/Mastodon make sense, because they require a fraction of the storage and processing power, also they don’t need monetization like video producers do. Not to mention Peertube is a privacy nightmare by leaking your IP to random peers by default.
Lemmy also has the IP leaking issue. Media isn’t proxied.
They do cache and serve images, if the server has it enabled. It’s enabled by default, but many turned it off after the CP incident.
I thought lemmy.world had more privacy measures.
Any software that doesn’t proxy media has this as an issue.
No, they don’t have any more privacy measures than any other instance.
Okay but what exactly do you mean by the IP leaking issue? Like in what way does lemmy leak your IP adress?
Your client must connect to the other instances to view an image, and by doing that you give them your IP address.
There was an image going around recently that showed your user agent to show this issue.
Isn’t this like browsing any website? Each instance is a website. Browsing the website will give them your IP address. You can see, that the current content ist coming from another instance by checking the name (though I don’t know if every app shows the instance in that way). And as Lemmy is a Link aggregator (to my knowledge) it will provide links.
But of course we can discuss if lemmy instances should proxy all interactions with other instances. Coming with its own problems.
Why do they require you to give them your IP adress to view an image?!
The IP address is how internet traffic is routed. Every time you visit a website, you hand over your IP address. That’s just how the internet works.
Peertube implementation maybe not, idk I do not know it.
But something similar where each YouTuber/Creator has it’s own instance for most would be viable. Of course for people that do it for free and have no income.from it would be more problematic but the rest they could afford it.
At one time, Yahoo ruled the search engine and Netscape ruled the web browser. Things are never permanent in the tech world. The Fediverse is the distant rumblings of the next phase of the internet. We are moving away, ever so slightly from the centralised corporate model to a user-distributed model. One day, every person on the internet will host and serve a shard of content, circumventing corporate and government gateways. So it shall be for video sites.
I want to go out on a limb here and say that pretty much nothing is permanent, be it on the internet or the lifespan of our universe.
Lol delusion much
Mr Chickenstalker isn’t too far off honestly.
A spooky thing to say in front of a chicken.
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I never thought reddit would disappear. That would be delusional. Fucking myspace is still around. It’s just nice to have an alternative so I don’t use it. I’m with you though. I can’t see decentralization working very well for a youtube replacement. We need to have some type of trust-busting that does something like have youtube be the backend and have available as many frontends as people want. Work out the money somehow or other.
Peertube is Fediverse Youtube.
Indeed. All that’s keeping Peertube from achieving popularity is… popularity.
Definitely worth joining Peertube and publishing some videos. Get the community going more.
(This from someone who hasn’t yet published anything on Peertube. I’m working on it. Promise.)
I think the problem is just the massive storage costs of holding lots of video. Youtube is king because anyone can upload whatever, at any amount, but instances of peertube have to monitor their usage closely.
I was uploading to one only for vtubers, and they said they had enough money for 6months or so without dono help, but one month someone attacked or something and just ended up consuming videos at a repeated and huge enough rate that they got a surprise bill that was just too high. They also near the end had to turn off better streaming encoding because it was bandwidth heavy.
A Mastodon account I follow made a thread of recommended peertube channels, for people looking for stuff to watch over there.
Its the first i ever hear of peertube
Is it any good or just a weird mix og trans people and communists?
Probably the latter. There’s tons of logistical issues with trying to compete against YouTube, even without considering its monopoly; mainly, storing and hosting all that data requires enormous servers, and along with that is the cost of doing so. Then there’s moderation issues; checking each video as it comes in to make sure it’s not violating copyright laws or otherwise infringing terms of use, etc. Plus having enough staff to maintenance the servers and provide moderation. YouTube is already struggling with all of these, despite how enormous Google is; if I remember right, they actually lose money keeping YouTube both afloat and free.
If YouTube shut down today I’m sure someone would eventually try to create an alternative and might even succeed (provided they have enough resources), but right now since someone else (Google) is already taking on that ludicrously insane job, I doubt there will be any form of viable or worthwhile alternative.
Then again, I’m not an expert on the subject lol.
I don’t think you actually need to compete against Youtube to be a viable alternative. It doesn’t seem like it matters that Peertube has 0.001% of the userbase as Youtube because the goal isn’t to make money. If I want to host a video to share with people I can put it on Peertube right now and give people a link. I’d call that a viable alternative.
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I think the idea is that it is at least similar in feature set. The only part that PeerTube doesn’t have is that it doesn’t have the number of users and revenue for scalability. I’m just saying that if you had a Youtube like website it doesn’t need to compete with Youtube to be viable.
vimeo has been around for many years, whats wrong with vimeo?
If it’s so great why hasn’t everyone left YouTube for it?
If that’s your reply when someone mentions a decently sized and recognizable alternative then why are you asking your original question?
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What do you think viable alternative and financially stable mean? Your responses seem to imply that you are asking if there is a bigger player other than YouTube which you know there isn’t. Did you want to hear about the alternatives or did you just want to complain about YouTube?
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Running a streaming service is incredibly expensive and complex.
Google only really manage it due to it being tied into the rest of their business.
It’s unlikely something of that scale could be achieved by anyone else.
Twitch
Pornhub
Vimeo
Netflix and other streaming services that are already established could try it
I think you make a good point. Most of these companies have cut out some portion of the streaming market. YouTube just happens to have a slice of market that’s quite huge.
I’d say it’s more likely that we’ll see some competition in some niche that’s currently served by YouTube rather than complete YouTube replacement.
Youtube (and Twitch to a degree) are in unique positions because they own their own infra (GCP and AWS).
I’d wager a true competitor would almost be required to operate similarly to avoid being dependent on a IaaS provider.
If we get some big breakthrough that sends storage costs and bandwidth cost way down then I think it’s possible. Otherwise between the astronomical costs involved and the difficulty attracting an audience and creators, I don’t think it would happen unless Google axes YouTube for whatever reason.
I don’t think it would happen unless Google axes YouTube for whatever reason.
And yet, because it’s Google… Maybe…?
Sobs over my long dead Google Wave account.
Or enough incremental improvements tbh
there was Dailymotion (well techincally still is) but it lost traction after banning nudity (like half their site was “wardrobe malfunction” related content). Then again, there wasn’t too much traction there to begin with due to data limits, especially for newer users. There’s a lot of alternative sites that claim they’re a more ethical youtube alternative, but they’re niche at best, and getting any traffic comparable to a fraction of youtube traffic is an uphill battle not unlike Sisyphus’s boulder
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Peertube is a decentralized version.
I’m confused on what peertube is, does it just give you links to other sites where the videos actually are?
It’s a decentralized platform. Similar to lemmy, you can sign up with (or create your own) instance of peertube and upload videos there.
It depends on wha you define as viable. If you want to see a bunch of videos about anything and everything advertiser friendly, then there are no options. If you want to see videos about advertiser non-friendly topics, then you’re in luck, because there are quite a few places hosting videos like that. If you don’t really care about the quantity, then odysee is a pretty good option IMO. If that’s not puratian enough for you, consider checking out peertube. The video selection is pretty small, but as long as you like what they have, then even peertube can be a viable option for you. Probably not that viable for most people, but it can be for some.
As far as I’m concerned, odysee is pretty good, whereas peertube is far too limited at the moment. Youtube has been taking many small steps towards becoming as bad as TV, and when they finally cross the line, I’m ready to switch. I won’t have that much to watch, but I guess that sort of lifestyle will serve me well in the long run.
It would have to be Microsoft or Amazon.
Yeah, that’s basically it. If you want to start small, only host your own videos to your own twelve followers it’s pretty easy. If you manage to make a fan base and create some income you might be able to grow the servers as the viewers come. But to start a competitor from scratch and have it handle huge amounts of users and videos it would have to come from an established player with the necessary power. Those three are the really big fish and they have the money as well.
Apple and Netflix might be able to create something as well, but they don’t have the infrastructure, so they would have to pay more. At least Netflix, I’m not sure about Apple.
There could be if you were ok with videos being 400p and 20fps. Maybe use some upscaler that runs on the client. Maybe you have to pay to upload.
Storage and bandwidth are really what makes it impossible to do.
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Google*
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There isn’t at the moment, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be. YouTube doesn’t have anything special, it’s just the most popular, and by virtue of being the most popular people use it more. You need to understand that YouTube is HUGE, we’re talking possibly the largest server farm in the world. Just the amount of storage needed is ridiculous, not to mention the amount of people working to do everything from service the servers to moderate content. It’s impossible for anything to compete right now.
But this was also the case for Yahoo back in the day, and Google appeared and essentially wiped them out.
YouTube doesn’t have anything special
Infinite money isn’t anything special?
I meant to say it’s not special as a platform, it doesn’t have any feature that other video hosting platforms can’t offer. But like the rest of my post mentions it’s got an infrastructure that’s too expensive to reproduce, no other video hosting site comes close, not even by a long shot, but that’s not really a “YouTube” thing, any other video hosting site that has reached that amount of content would be the same size.
YouTube doesn’t have anything special
YouTube literally has data centers full of custom silicon which is 20-33x more efficient compared to general-purpose hardware.
