Video is impossible to break into because of how expensive it is. Even YouTube by all accounts is just breaking even. And that is with Google's entire infrastructure and advertising machinery behind it. A new entrant simply doesn't stand a chance.

Hold on... A ton of broadcasters, production companies, and individuals have done it and are doing it.

YouTube have many competitors and some of them are enormous, such as Netflix and cable TV. Production companies are popping up all the time and are making some of the world's highest quality material. The same for individuals who are making videos.

Or do you mean that YouTube needs a competitor that does exactly the same thing as YouTube?

All of them are based on the traditional media production model. The companies were all well established in the industry (minus Netflix) and the only change was to go from broadcast/cable/theater to streaming. YouTube pioneered user generated videos and independent content creators. Its only competitor is probably Twitch, but that itself is owned by Amazon and losing a ton of money.

All of them have the technical infrastructure to host user uploaded videos, so it's not impossible to compete with YouTube.

No one does video even remotely close to the scale YT does it. YT has by far the deepest market penetration (close to 3 billion monthly users), and has by far the most hosted content, and critically, youtube adds over a half-million hours of video a day.

Essentially, youtube adds more video every single day than the entirety of every other streaming service offers combined.

Youtube is in it's own category, and it's unsurprising no else wants to touch it.

Counted in number of hours watched, I'm pretty sure that Netflix, cable TV and satellite TV, can compete with YouTube.

But everybody has to start somewhere. Would it be impossible for Netflix to start adding for example 100 000 hours of user generated video per day?

Would it be practical and economical is the right question to ask.

Providers would be more than happy to sell Netflix the build out

Serving user generated content is very expensive in terms of infrastructure. More expensive in many ways than streaming studio generated content.

The scales of the two models are very different. Ingesting content is more complicated with user generated content because there's few guarantees about formats (encoding, color, file formats). Serving the content is also more complicated because it's not as friendly to edge caches as studio content. Part of the expense of YouTube is the long tail of content. Popular content might live in edge caches but YouTube serves up old unpopular stuff too.

Those things do not sound like a very big hurdle for a massive company like Netflix, in my opinion. They could simply demand a certain encoding, color and file format from uploaders. As for edge caching, not my specialty, but if Google can do it so could probably Netflix.

The most difficult part, and one that Youtube has struggled with since the beginning, would be content moderation. It's a technical, legal, and PR nightmare and there's no reason for Netflix to wade into that mess.

Then why is there reason for YouTube to be in that mess? Netflix currently has no problem in broadcasting and selling some of the vilest and most offensive stuff imaginable, including outright child pornography.

Nebula just doesn't have a product I want. I don't care for early access to Youtube videos.

Maybe this isn't the case for you, but a number of creators I watch have some videos that they only upload to Nebula. So it's worth it for me to see those videos I otherwise wouldn't ever get to see.

I pay for Nebula and still use Youtube a ton. Nebula is nice but it doesn’t have all channels I watch.

Vis a vis nebula, this is definitely a product issue. Dropout.tv seems to be extremely successful and has a similar value proposition

I've got a Nebula lifetime membership and it's neat. I actually discovered channels through it (Not Just Bikes, WonderWhy, 12tone,...) which I hadn't heard of before. I also paid for YT Premium Lite in the past. The full YT Premium is too expensive for me, though.

But I feel a better example of paying for convenience is the Twitch subscriber system. They make it work in a way that others fail at by tying it in to various things like emotes and channel points and the general sense of supporting the creators. I know YT memberships exist, but I don't know how widely those are used and they just don't seem to get pushed as much.

Twitch also lets people pay more than just the service price. So you'll they some people paying for themselves, but you'll also get whales paying for hundreds of other people. No other site I know of lets you do that really.

And it's not just that they pay for other people and that money goes to the particular streaming they're watching - they gift subs which can they be given to any other streamer if they want. Twitch does seem to have quite a versatile and user-friendly model for supporting creators.

(I think? I'm not very well-versed in Twitch stuff)

re: rebula

I'm someone willing to shell out for SaaS and I don't see nebula being significantly better than just paying for youtube premium (which I do). They have some exclusive content but paying to watch a subset of content ad-free is just not going to work out (on a large scale, I know they're worth like $200m but that's much less than $1t)