I've seen a few YouTubers have a centralized site for signups and support where they host all their content. While the YT revenue is important, they at least have a way to engage their consumers should something terrible happen. This is BCP in a nutshell.
Similarly there's a reason LTT launched Floatplane. Risk management is important regardless of how big your business is. Even if you're large enough for youtube to assign you an actual person for support.
Also I don't think you can build a community on Twitter anyway. It's just shouting into the void. They could use it for announcements (and do, LTT is on Twitter, too), but little else.
Using it for announcements is precisely the primary reason they claimed to want to keep the forums. So in this case, Twitter would be appropriate.
You can put an html video tag and call it a day, but you'll be missing out on using the best codec for each viewer and bandwidth adaptation and (last I looked, hopefully I'm wrong) usable UI.
Bandwidth is an issue, although I've seen enough high bandwidth, unmetered server offers that I think it might work. Depending on where your viewers are and where you find cheap bandwidth, you might get poor performance just from distance, whereas YouTube and Facebook have CDNs with nodes everywhere.
A seriously crappy PC, poor bandwidth an some noisy old disks is enough to host 5 TB+
So you go for a reseller which there are many stellar ones but they'll either utilize a program with the datacenter akin to an reseller affiliate program with them being the 3rd party support or do it all themselves. If they do the reseller affiliate program they cant really offer anything outside of theie markups on the existing offerings by the datacenter. If they do it all themselves then it becomes much more expensive for the upfront costs.
What you want is a VPS and a CDN which provides a better experience and what every streaming platform uses. Not that expensive either!
Also, is Hetzner actually unmetered or do they claim they are with an asterisk?
Is there a way to do it with some p2p à la popcorntime?
Then if there was a surge, the peers could absorb some of it.
Does peertube do that?
other replies mention the client compatibility, quality and bandwidth issues with self hosting but i think this can be reasonably adressed with just going for a common denominator on the self-hosting side (eg. 720p h264)
There has been several moral panics incited by the conventional media (TV, newspapers etc) about adverts being displayed alongside edgy content a while back. Several rounds of this eventually brought about a TOS change where they could deem you "not advertiser friendly". This of course ignored that Google does targeted advertising.
Some claim it is "political" however I believe it is simpler than that. It gave youtube an excuse to stop paying people without outright removing them from the platform which saves them a fair bit of money and doesn't quite bring the same outrage from the respective fanbases as outright removing people. In addition to that the people that have been demonetised have ranged from progressives, anarcho-communists, people doing ben-shapiro compilation videos and edgy boys and girls that tend to shitpost. So I don't see anything political about it.
They've also made it harder to be monetised on the platform generally, IIRC you can't be monetised at all and cannot receive super chats if you have less than 1000 subscribers. You also can't put custom thumbnails on your videos which makes it harder for your content to get attention.
It's more complicated than that. Small time creators or others ineligible for the Youtube "partner program" have no choice but to monetize outside of Youtube. With this change, the only way you as a creator can choose whether ads appear on your video is to make partner.
The scummy thing here is that Youtube has made it harder and harder for creators to become eligible to monetize their channels, and now they're swooping in to take 100% of the ad revenue on those small-time channels.
Not sure how many small creators both can't manage that but can manage external monetization?
Also with 1000 subscribers you dont guarantee 1000 views, just potential views.
Perhaps their current pricing model is fair, I have no idea. But being the de facto video hosting site gives them tons of power. They have the ability to extract extra value out of their users---much more than a non-monopolized market would allow.
They didn't do it because they had a monopoly, they don't have a monopoly. It was more base than that. They did it because they wanted more money. Which is their right. I'm not complaining, but everyone's putting forth a great deal of high tone reasoning fro something that really is base venality at its root. They want more money. They believe they can get it even though they are not a monopoly. Even though Facebook is bigger. And even though their users will get mad.
The reality is, most of their customers aren't going anywhere. Consider all the times you use Youtube. Trying to find a music video, watching sports highlights, videos from your favourite creators. Can you switch to DailyMotion for all of that now? Are all of your creators posting their videos on Facebook? Even if they are, are the videos as easy to find and discover as they are on Youtube? For content creators, is there anywhere else they can share and expect to find the same kind of audience? Not really.
This is what I'm talking about when I say monopoly. It's true, there's other options. A creator can post their videos on Vimeo and host their own website to monetize, just like someone could have taken a horse and buggy instead of the new railroad. No one is forced to go by train, but doing it the old way is inefficient and expensive. n both cases they won't get the same bang for their buck.
I just become worried when they use their monopoly to extract as much value as possible, far beyond what they need to sustain their profits. I think monopolies are bad in principle, and Youtube is another example, just like Microsoft was, cable companies are, telecom was, railroads were, etc.
But I'm not sure that's clear. There's been a distinct increase in the number of in-video ads (Raycon, Skillshare, ExpressVPN, Squarespace, Curiosity Stream, and so on), which probably corresponds to a distinct decrease in Youtube enabled ads. So with that logic, Youtube is probably making less money from top creators, who have been skipping the middleman entirely. This seems more like a step to retaining existing profits instead of increasing them.
> But at the same time, there are people who have so heavily invested into the YouTube ecosystem with certain expectations for a very long time, and pretty much have their entire business on there, so they can't very easily take their business elsewhere if they're unhappy with the change.
A key part of running a business is risk management & mitigation. YouTube has very obviously been an ad-supported video platform for at least a decade. Hoping nothing changes about your little ad-free corner of that platform is not a sound business plan.
It's shitty that Google didn't give a heads up, but anyone whose business is riding on this should definitely have been expecting something like this and had a backup plan. Literally free content hosting is obviously not a thing that will exist for very long. Enjoy it while it lasts, but you know also have a Vimeo account ready to go as well or something like that.