youtube's strategy (e.g., 'the reason') was to leverage google's resources to undermine the revenue-making opportunities of the whole market so that it could outlast them to domination. it used google's (monopolistic) advantages in search and online advertising, as well as its capital warchest, to effect this strategy. that warchest, for instance, allowed it to offer free hosting/streaming, something that was difficult for smaller players to do. google's dominance in search allowed it to offer premium advertising to youtube videos. google's dominance in online advertising (again, monopolistically) gave youtube an advantage in monetization and targeting.
in short, this wasn't a story of a scrappy competitor overcoming the odds to become the market leader. it was hoarded capital and monopoly advantage being deployed to corner another market. that is, it was an (unprosecuted) anti-trust violation.
[0]: note the broader connotation of 'technical', not limited to just technology
Your side point about it supposedly being an anti-trust violation isn't even a proper answer to the question.
The point was that unless you already have a money printing business in another area that you can use to chase this for years without budgetary constraints, it would be very difficult to build something of a similar scale. I think you are arguing a point that my post largely already agrees with.
Any company has an edge on any non existent company, because they exist - they have the tools, the infrastructure, the knowledge needed to run the business, all things that the non existent company first has to aquire. Doesn't explain why nobody else can do it! Because things, in general, can be aquired. But clarity did: Youtube has Google. Youtube was able to aquire things nobody else could.
Example: You said youtube needs near unlimited bandwidth. This argument doesn't show me why there can't be a competitor. Youtube's business model seems to pay off, so you should be able to convince an investor to pay you, too, unlimited bandwidth, right? Money is immaterial if you can show that you can make more of it at a later stage.
For example, you claim that Vimeo "vimeo has all of those [features] to some degree".
But it doesn't. Vimeo isn't ad supported (this is literally their main differentiator from youtube). Doesn't appear to do algorithmic curation/recommendation (again, they consider this a differentiator), and has a tiny fraction of the upload rate and watchtime of youtube (so bandwidth and transcoding cost are lower).
Those are related to their distinct strategies: Youtube aims to be the product where anyone can share video for free (that's youtube's strategy!). Vimeo doesn't aim to do that. Doing the first invites challenges of scale that the second doesn't. Youtube operates at a scale where it makes sense to hire silicon engineers to build custom video transcoding chips. That doesn't make sense for vimeo.
You can maybe argue that Youtube was only successful because of Google's existing ad business (although I don't know how true/organizationally valid this argument is), but the idea that the "strategy" behind Youtube was to be illegal is sort of ridiculous.
And heck, OP of the thread even offers examples of successful competitors in the broad video media space: Twitch and TikTok (and arguably also Instagram via Reels). Youtube does have competitors in terms of video social media. It also has competitors in terms of video hosting. What it doesn't have is competitors in terms of scale (Reels and Tiktok limit content size, Twitch stores only a small fraction of streamed videos, vimeo makes you pay for the storage and bandwidth you use). That's due to a lot of technical optimizations that are difficult to replicate.
To be clear, even if we assume Youtube's rise was anticompetitive, your argument relies on that being the explicit strategy, which well, there's decent documentation to believe it wasn't. Assuming that because a bad thing happened, everyone involved is evil, is weird, and requires you to jump through weird hoops to justify.
in a competitive market, there are two broad strategies available: cost (walmart) and differentiation (apple). youtube coerced its market into being favorable to itself by leveraging the anti-competitive aspects i mentioned earlier. that simply trumps product tactics, and even these two competitive market strategies; it subverts entire markets unfairly and uneconomically. i really can't teach you strategy or market economics in an hn comment; you need to go study that yourself. also, arguing from emotion is a sure-fire way to lead yourself astray.
less flippantly, you can actually find a lot of free mba courses online now. here’s one page listing some resources (halfway down): https://www.uopeople.edu/blog/the-best-free-online-mba-cours...
uopeople offers a cheap online mba, apparently accredited even (i personally can’t vouch for it’s quality though). investopedia is also a good reference resource for looking up random business concepts.
Have you read anything by Karl Marx regarding captialism? You seem to know a ton about capital and how it pervades society and social stratification of the workforce and labor.
i've read a bit of marx but mostly in digest form. das kapital and adam smith's wealth of nations are on my list of older, original works that i want to read in full. i'm sympathetic to the labor theory of value, which both explored in their works, but most modern economists seem to eschew and even fear.
IMO, it might be wise for Netflix to start their own YouTube-like service. For example, subscribe to Netflix, get access to user-created videos on a separate app. The best part is that users would then generate content for a fraction of what they currently pay to produce content, and they could have basically what YouTube has, but ad-free.
Surely the CDN for that huge streaming library is the expensive part of their infra.
As long as you move a few PB around the globe on your video release date, Netflix is fine.
It's very easy to build a Netflix in comparison to yt.
I would argue that for Netflix going into yt direction would eat up there revenue baseline fast.
More static content than YT. Better viewer:creator ratio. Fewer content headaches. Content moderation is lower volume and amounts to watching the film. And closer to their existing product fit.
It's actually kind of mind-boggling that Netflix hasn't pivoted into a turnkey solution (standard deal + optional financing support + broadcast platform) for mass-market film-making. Everyone's content starved, it's an obvious weakness that Amazon / Disney / ATT are blind to, and somehow Reed Hastings hasn't pushed in that direction. It's literally what Netflix is famous for doing (twice!): be the platform.
I've been mostly hearing the opposite, most people feel like they have more content they want to watch than they have time to.
The key part there is "if they wanted."
Any upstart would have to burn who knows how much capital to try and ramp up, hosting videos for free and getting only a tiny fraction of the ad revenue that Google can extract from a video due to their smaller scale. Even if somebody wanted to subsidize this with reserves or VC funding, the endgame is that they're competing directly against Google, and if faced with actual competition Google can always afford to undercut them until they ran out of reserves or VC funding.
Far better for these sites to claim a niche that Google has no interest in and just fly below the radar.
[0] MindGeek operates under a complex structure of multiple companies in countries such as the British Virgin Islands, Canada, Curaçao, Cyprus, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, Mauritius, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States.[60][8] Its structure has been described as mostly a way to avoid corporate tax by a de facto Canadian company;[8][3][61] with billing companies in Ireland,[62] subsidiaries in Curaçao and holding ones in Cyprus and Luxembourg, all countries that have been identified as tax havens or having lax tax regulations. Canada also has special tax treaties with Luxembourg, the legal headquarters of MindGeek, where a Canadian subsidiary is exempt from taxes paid on royalties to its Luxembourg parent.[8]
Video quality is low.
Video amount should probably be 1000 if not 10000 smaller than yt.
I'm not aware of millions uploading hour and hours of high quality videos to their platform.
I myself only go there for a short period of time.
I know plenty of people who keep streams from yt running in parallel.
YouTube achieved this in 15 years time with the help of Google's enormous resources. YouTube competitor would need to have some innovation that is hard for YouTube to replicate.
Funny enough TikTok was able to replicate YouTube in a few years time but only for short videos so it shows you don't need all that what you mentioned. Innovation is what you need.
Like all things? The proper engineering effort is hard to find in such a capacity and a budget to do all of this is overwhelming for most tech companies to attempt where an ROI can be seen within tolerable risk.
It's like saying we could live on mars if we had "proper engineering effort, timeline and budget".
Isn't this the MO of vimeo? Target higher quality content, and allow pay-per-hosting to avoid ads?
I thought HN was the opposite of this - finding ways to upend fat companies from occupying monopoly positions. "Hacker" news.
More reasons to break up Big Tech from a government regulations perspective - The only democratic politician talking about it is Elizabeth Warren. But many are upending large incumbents without gov reg - Stripe ("Increase the GDP of the internet") and Square in payments/ecommerce space. Tesla taking on Big 4. I would like to see a real competitor for Google search. Perhaps Algolia? Their search is incredible on HN.
Yes! I find any other video website that is not YouTube to be simply unusable. Don't get me started with Spotify's video player. My thought when I see a website using anything else: just put the damn thing on YouTube! The players suck, the experience suck, everything sucks on other products.
1. It consumes nearly unlimited bandwidth.
2. It consumes nearly unlimited CPU for transcoding and serving media at different bitrates.
3. It consumes massive resources to police, from user moderation to appeasing content owners by building systems and databases like ContentID, etc.
4. It generates endless PR and legal headaches, which also costs a lot of money.
5. A huge amount of work has gone into getting users hooked through algorithms that seek to maximize watch time.
6. A huge amount of work has gone into building a network of advertisers who want to pay to put their ads on the platform.
7. And importantly, a huge amount of work has gone into building up an ecosystem of video producers who make their entire living off of YouTube and spend countless hours producing content for them at no cost to YouTube. Obviously YouTube isn't giving out Golden Play Button plaques out of the kindness of their heart. That's marketing.
And despite all this, Youtube almost always works perfectly for almost all users. People click on their phones and the videos just play - all around the world, even while traveling on transit, etc.
There are very few companies who have the resources to attempt to compete with that. Vimeo has obviously given up targeting the same mass market audience. Other competitors without unlimited deep pockets can't seem to make a dent.
It's a lot like asking why doesn't someone just make "a better Google." Unless you have unlimited resources and an unlimited budget, it probably isn't possible. It's smarter to make something else tangental in video that can outcompete Google instead of facing them head on. See: Twitch, TikTok, etc.