Yeah, startups aren't going to magically make things cheaper than YouTube. So if any startups arise, they would follow a paid model most likely.

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.

If you are a poor kid, you upload your interpretation of a Bach piece and get slammed by an injust, extralegal pseudo-copyright mechanism, that’s in essence an attack on human culture..

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... )

Why do you think that a dozen of startups in the space remaining after a possible youtube demise won't be burdened by the same policies? I think that the copyright lobby would try their best to tighten their control at a time when a huge corp stopped throwing its weight against them.

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.

Oh, they absolutely would! Every music streaming service is already beholden to a tiny record industry cartel, even though there are a number of music streaming services.

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.

That's basically what PeerTube tries to do. It doesn't work well in practice for most people and organizations that try it because most videos only have 0-1 watchers at a time.

Yeah, exactly. Because they have to compete with a behemoth subsidized by an invasive advertising company..

Thanks @cannabis_sam, never thought of this but yes absolutely. The tech is slowly getting there... but innovation would speed up a lot more if there was a significant enough pain (and therefore significant enough upside).

What are you talking about?

I'm talking about being competition to an entity like YouTube which is funded by an internet advertising behemoth. Is that what you're talking about?

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.

I think YouTube fits in perfectly with Google. It allows them to offer another medium of advertisement (video) to their customers. If YouTube was split off, both creator earnings and YouTube earnings would fall through the floor because the ads wouldn't be worth so much without Google's targeting algorithm behind it.

An unrelated company to their business model is something like Waymo