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I've been wondering for awhile how Google gets away with their anticompetitive practices in terms of YouTube. They built a huge business on search advertising,

I've been wondering for awhile how Google gets away with their anticompetitive practices in terms of YouTube. They built a huge business on search advertising, and then turn around and use that to run a video distribution infrastructure for well over a decade at profound economic loss just to guarantee no one else could ever get investment to build a competing infrastructure. It's essentially impossible to get the billions of dollars necessary to build a global video distribution system if you have to tell investors that they need to be willing to lose mountains of money for perhaps multiple decades while they wait out Google.

derobert 8y ago
For it being essentially impossible, its sure been done a lot: Netflix, MindGeek (NSFW), and Amazon definitely have at least as large video streaming (especially with Amazon now owning Twitch). There are a lot of large, though not really global, ones too (e.g., in the US there is Hulu, CBS, HBO, various sports, etc.). I'm not sure how big Facebook's video streaming (probably fairly large, considering its Facebook). Smaller YouTube-like sites exist; for example Vimeo is still around. Building a video hosting site costs a lot less than billions. Unless you have YouTube's traffic, you don't need their capacity.