The "hosting" aspect of YouTube is really a small part of why the service dominates. The connections between channels and links from one video to another channel -- network effects and discovery -- are what make disrupting YT seem impossible.
Kind of crazy given how YT originated in juvenile joke vids, but YT may have the potential to become Google's biggest source of revenue despite any number of overbearing content policies. The new ads below videos for products of potential interest based on the video content are annoying but probably very profitable.
i highly doubt that. The youtube monopoly is due to both audience, and the monitization model available (which, atm is getting shoddier and shoddier every day with random demonitizations).
Hosting is a big issue, but it's a technical issue, and other platforms (such as vemeo, or some other platform) has "solved". But those platforms don't dominate (or even show up as a blip!) because content creators can't use them to make their living.
Not a bad idea, as entire channels have gotten the boot for much less, from Youtube itself.
I learned my lesson after Nintendo went berzerk and requested takedowns for gameplay videos and walkthroughs; smashrockgroin's series for Goldeneye 64 was both funny and informative when playing that game, but now those videos are gone forever. I've vowed never to buy a Nintendo product again because of that alone.
Going after pirates and such I can sort of understand, but people enjoying your product (and obviously helping to promote it)? WTF.
It reminds me of the complete opposite of this old meme: http://lurkmore.so/images/9/94/360_Kid.jpg
The usual rationale is that walkthroughs / let's play videos show enough of the game that people may opt to just watch the video, instead of playing the game itself.
I can sort of understand this position when it comes to videos that e.g. show the entire single-player campaign with zero commentary. But I'm not convinced that people opting for such videos would have bought the game if the walkthroughs were not available.
also, if the game has nothing else to offer when compared to a video playthrough, may be it's the game that has the problem!
They were filmed on a Nikon DSLR in 1080p. A few weeks after uploading they were fine, 1080p. Several months later, I noticed a few were 720p, and now many are 480p, but a extremely poor quality 480p that looks more like < 240. For a few that are still 720p, and some that are 480p, the framerate has been reduced to maybe 4 fps.
Maybe it was the codec Nikon was using, but regardless, they're basically gone, and I no longer consider Youtube a "safe" place for videos.
I would send links, but I don't want to dox myself.
ArchiveTeam also has a recommended list of flags for archival: https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=YouTube
It does that by default. (If you have ffmpeg)
`youtube-dl -f best -citw -v <url of channel or playlist>`
If I recall, that's going to ignore errors. At an airport right now so I can't remember exactly what those flags are.
> Do I always have to pass -citw?
> By default, youtube-dl intends to have the best options (incidentally, if you have a convincing case that these should be different, please file an issue where you explain that ( https://yt-dl.org/bug )). Therefore, it is unnecessary and sometimes harmful to copy long option strings from webpages. In particular, the only option out of -citw that is regularly useful is -i.
But OK, here's explantion of the options you used:
• -f best: Select the best quality format represented by a single file with video and audio. (By default, yt-dl will merge best video with best audio if that's what's available.)
• -c: Force resume of partially downloaded files. (By default, yt-dl will resume downloads if possible.)
• -i: Continue on download errors, for example to skip unavailable videos in a playlist.
• -t: Use title in file name. (Deprecated. This is the default.)
• -w: Do not overwrite files.
• -v: Print various debugging information.
FWIW, in addition to their awesome disk stats Backblaze also provides blueprints for their chassis as well as a BOM for the parts inside
Wow, I had no idea they did that. I definitely have a new respect for them.
and there are plenty of others too.
hopefully a completely decentralized replacement will arise.
(OT: wow, HN strips emoji!)
Ironically, we used to have a nice, decentralized Internet, and services like YouTube have been probably the biggest cause of damage to it.
Not so many years ago, everyone got a bit of web space and their own URL along with the connection from their ISP. You could put your own web site there, for all to see. Many ISPs would allow running some basic software. Visitors would find these sites through search engines or [gasps] manually created links from other sites with relevant material.
An analogous service today would probably involve providing a useful amount of space and bandwidth, and probably some ready-made blogging or video hosting software so non-geeks could just start creating something instead of having to install anything first. But in reality, almost no ISPs (at least here in the UK) routinely offer that sort of service any more, because the likes of YouTube and Medium have killed it.
practically speaking, people creating their own webpages and hoping to get indexed by a search engine or included in a hand-curated directory is not going to get anywhere close to that. you restrict your creators to a tiny, tiny fraction of the population w/ those skills.
so the trick is how to have the great ux of these centralized services without the downsides of centralized control. seems like there's a good chance it's possible.
(for other services, we did used to have (well, still do) pretty good decentralized variants. slack vs irc, reddit/hn vs newsgroups, email vs fb messenger. but even the more minor usability improvements of the centralized alternatives seems to be enough for them to displace what came before. maybe the tide will swing back.)
They're certainly useful. I just question whether we wouldn't have found other ways to achieve these kinds of benefits if we didn't have YouTube, with the entire Internet interested in the results and well over a decade to come up with something.
random example of youtube shittiness i just stumbled over:
1. high-speed net access is becoming more and more common; higher speed help makes the possible overhead of distributed solutions less of a barrier
2. there is more awareness now of the downsides of having a centralized provider. many youtube creators and users have been burned by google; i think that'll generate real demand for a decentralized solution.
3. existence/arguably success of decentralized currencies provides a lot of psychic energy/motivation for making decentralized things.
Hopefully the next great online video service will have support for displaying the original encoding for uploaded videos, saving them all another generation of quality degradation due to transcoding.
- Intellectual discussions
- Fan made instrumentals and remixes (especially for Rammstein)
- Found footage, old shows, and other nostalgic material from VHS tapes. (wouldn't surprise me if they get flagged for having Folgers commercials from 1993)
- Random funny videos with swearing or vulgar language
Not a whole lot of things that are likely to be relevant to most people, but I've a culture of my own and I'd like to preserve that. To forever lose something I enjoy means losing a bit of myself and not being able to share that with others.
Would you be at all interested in software that helps to construct a permanent showcase of the stuff that matters to you? It would handle things like archiving to enable a focus on curation and presentation.
I've been thinking of making something like this because services like the internet archive don't seem quite right. There's no context. I just worry that nobody would be interested in doing the work of providing that context.
And what software do you use? Streamlink?
Streamlink looks like a great project. Thanks for mentioning it!