It is far more likely that YouTube will go bankrupt, since running a free video service where videos are almost infinite and cache hits much lower is very costly. Couple that with all the other advantages of being with Google like access to talent and infra, I don't see YouTube surviving with Google. It's possible that the tab will be picked up by Facebook video, and that is an even worse platform and more closed.
I don't see a cheap way of solving the YouTube problem. (Yes P2P exists but has too many problems like battery consumption on phones and NAT).
Now that might be fantastic depending on where you come from. If you have disposable income, it is a huge win to have a non ad supported video platform which might even be more privacy protecting. If you are a poor kid using YouTube to watch MIT OCW and khan academy and innumerable other resources, well you are screwed.
MIT and Khan Academy could easily host their content using BitTorrent and reduce their bandwidth usage by 95% ( https://nrkbeta.no/2008/03/02/thoughts-on-bittorrent-distrib... )
What youtube gives to the poor kid is instant and free access to a huge audience. Yes, it's comes with an (admittedly not really high) risk of a false positive and blocking for copyright reasons. I suppose the kid is smart enough to also have copies of the performance on other services, and safely stored locally.
But it’s simple, video is more versatile, and by removing youtube’s monolithic dominance, you remove the single point of failure that copyright cartels have been able to attack.
As an example, imagine a separate youtube-clone dedicated to education that was actually willing to fight for fair use! Or a youtube that didn’t automatically demonetized you for swearing.
Internet already gives these kids (and the rest of us) both access and audience, we have just been stupid enough to lock large parts of our cultural heritage into corporate silos, protected by “intellectual property”-laws. Competition wouldn’t solve this completely, but it would make it harder to distort the market.
YouTube can afford to offer a lot of value to the customer, much more than it would have been able to sustain by itself without the Google support.
Without offering all that value, definitionally, Youtube would not be as attractive to consumers.
Therefore consumers would be more likely to choose other alternatives like PeerTube
Therefore projects like PeerTube would have more support and therefore would develop more quickly.
An unrelated company to their business model is something like Waymo
They have got problems, yes , but there is far too much good content on youtube with a very very long tail. In lockdown, I have tried almost dozens of different cooking channels for different things. It is the magic of YouTube that so many people are able to take their content to so many viewers seamlessly at no cost or loss of convenience to them.
That pays for a lot of storage. And storage is very cheap at that scale.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2...
This isn't exclusive to Google though - most large bandwidth users have peering agreements.
b) Google does have edge caches[1]. It's true that the long tail of YouTube videos is longer than Netflix, but since Google doesn't pay for traffic (see (a)) this only affects speed, not cost.
Would Apple be a counter-example? Multitouch, PA Semi, Siri, TouchID, etc etc lots of Apple technology was acquired but nobody laments the death of those “brands”
But honestly, who cares but geeks about what the general population thinks about who invented it?
Umm, this is exactly the problem the article talks about.
The fact that you had to pay obeisance to Apple to get access to private APIs and data is a failure of the anti-trust mechanisms.
The fact that Apple could just buy up Siri without anti-trust mechanisms kicking in meant they can just sit in their castle and let somebody else do the hard work.
VCs don’t invest in startups to help them build low profit “lifestyle businesses”. They fully expect them to be acquired or rarely become public. Just as an anecdote that we are all familiar with, only two YC companies have gone public — Pagerduty and Dropbox - and Dropbox is still not GAAP profitable.
If the governments takes away the ability of companies to get acquired, investments in startups will dry up and $BigTech would be the only ones with money to do research.
This doesn't make sense to me. Google search and youtube are just front-ends for Alphabet to make money through advertising.
If Alphabet truly was broken up, Google search and youtube would not be able to use google ads jointly in the same way, and they don't make money otherwise.
Not so sure about that. Maybe if you read HN a lot, but I think most users won't even notice.
Fun example: Star wars fans and Disney aquisition.
> they couldn't be creative and patient enough to compete with youtube so they gulp up YouTube
So what can they do? If they had launched "Google Videos" they would have surely been accused of squashing small companies... What option do they have?
Is Youtube even profitable?
Doesn't Google make 90%+ revenue from ads?
Yes, extremely[1].
Google (and most large bandwidth users) doesn't pay for bandwidth because they have peering agreements. Storage is cheap.
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2...
Revenue != Profit.
Hence my comments pointing out that the things that most people seem to think stop YouTube from being profitable (bandwidth and storage) aren't really factors for Google.
I dont think Youtube would have survived without Google.
Imagine if Alphabet was broken up, Google search can still afford to run a research lab, as can youtube.
The problem I think is how easy it is for large companies to acquire smaller companies. It's how they expand or enter a market, they refuse to be bothered to bootstrap a new org-unit. They just devour smaller, innovative and creative companies. Look at Google, they couldn't be creative and patient enough to compete with youtube so they gulp up youtube. It's the bigcorp M.O.
So why bother with R&D when you can just buy a smaller company that does R&D, tests the market and builds a brand for you? My answer: you will suffer from brain drain.and reputation loss,when you buy a smaller company,consumers assume that brand is now dead. You become a cemerery of dreams and ideas. You become an IBM,HP,Xerox and AT&T. Once the damage is done it becomes nearl impossible to recover from. I like IBM as the best example, they are doing superb amounta of innovation even today but look at all their initiatives lack any traction or competitive edge. They have a ton of smart people working on brand new areas of tech like quantum computing,but their reputation and overall culture has not been great. They've been declining consistently. Look at yahoo, yahoo!! They had legitimate means to compete with google toe-to-toe,they relied too much on aquisitions as did Verizon that recently aquired them for a meager $4B.
In the end I blame all this on how publicly traded companies prioritize quarterly profits as opposed to multi-year growth. Acquiring bumps up the stock value for a while, spending billions starting from scratch competing or developing a new concept is risky so stocks go down.