7 ms·

This. And even if you manage to somehow self-host your videos, YouTube is also a discovery service for these videos. Think about how many times you looked for a

This. And even if you manage to somehow self-host your videos, YouTube is also a discovery service for these videos. Think about how many times you looked for a video on a certain topic in YouTube's search bar itself, the recommendations and the Trending tab.

HeavyStorm 7y ago
Well, so is Medium. I can self host a blog but how will people find me? As the OP said, Medium ranks well.
- ralphstodomingo 7y ago
  It ranks well, but you rarely go on Medium's search bar or feed. I'd usually be here in HN, or Reddit, or some aggregator, where your self-hosted content can be found.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
irrational 7y ago
>if you manager to somehow self-host your videos... Wait, we've been self-hosting our own videos for years. It's not exactly rocket science. YouTube is convenient, but what it is doing from a technical standpoint isn't that difficult to do on your own server.
- merpnderp 7y ago
  How do you do this? I’ve looked at Digital Ocean and their super cheap bandwidth, but storing a serious amount of data would get expensive.
- jasode 7y ago
  >It's not exactly rocket science. YouTube is convenient, but what it is doing from a technical standpoint isn't that difficult to do on your own server. You've left several comments in this thread talking down to people as if they're ignorant about how to write an HTML5 <video> tag on their own web server. I wasn't the one that downvoted your comment but for some reason, a lot of technical folks like you misunderstand Youtube and how it enables video uploaders. (A previous commenter misunderstands Youtube the same way and my previous reply to it.[0]) There is no self-hosting web server stack to serve videos that charges $0 to the content creator whether it gets zero or 1 billion views. Therefore, repeatedly recommending "self-host your videos" -- completely misses the point. Consider a corporate giant like Microsoft. Several years ago, they used to self-host their tech videos on channel9.msdn.com.[1] Now they're hosted on Youtube.[2] Obviously, MS is not so technically inept that they don't know how to stream their own videos! They also have billions in cash to prevent "server bandwidth exceeded" errors so cost isn't the issue. Stop and think about why Microsoft switched to Youtube instead of using their own MS Azure infrastructure. As for the other metaphor of "sharecropper" for Youtube that seems popular... is Microsoft a "sharecropper"? Why or why not? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18488275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18488275 [1] clicking any of the new videos on Microsoft's front page will play embedded Youtube videos: https://channel9.msdn.com/ https://channel9.msdn.com/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/user/Microsoft/search?query=build https://www.youtube.com/user/Microsoft/search?query=build
  - Faark 7y ago
    Do you have a trustworthy source for MS "switching" to Youtube? Their self hosted videos of Build 2019 [0] is what they directed me to when i was searching for sessions. I later found Youtube versions through some other source as well (probably a link on HN), but this seems more of a PR move ("we don't do evil walled garden anymore") to me than a technical necessity. I do agree with your core message, that video is hard and not something a small player should build their own solution for. But saying video is to hard even for Microsoft seems a bit of a stretch... [0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/build https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/build eg https://mybuild.techcommunity.microsoft.com/sessions/77571 https://mybuild.techcommunity.microsoft.com/sessions/77571
    - ralphstodomingo 7y ago
      If it was a PR move, is "we don't do evil walled garden anymore" more important than "Azure rocks and we do a lot of shit with it, look at this case study"?
    - filmgirlcw 7y ago
      https://www.YouTube.com/MicrosoftDeveloper https://www.YouTube.com/MicrosoftDeveloper has all the Build 2019 videos (and 2018 as well. We still self-host for countries where YouTube isn’t available (or if something goes down), but for Channel 9 anyway[1], we’ve moved to YouTube because that’s where the audience is and it makes sense to be where our users expect us to be. This isn’t about video being hard; our internal player is pretty good and works everywhere (which is not true for YouTube). This was a conscientious decision to go to where our audience is. We still have a self-hosted backup for each video, complete with captions in a variety of languages. But we’d heard repeatedly that our users preferred using YouTube to discover content and not being there didn’t make sense. This isn’t true for all Microsoft content, but for our developer focused videos, we want to be where the community is. [1]: https://channel9.msdn.com https://channel9.msdn.com (I was directly involved in the decision to move our developer content to YouTube.)
    - jasode 7y ago
      >But saying video is to hard even for Microsoft seems a bit of a stretch. I actually said the opposite of that. I emphasized that MS had both the technical skill and money to host their own videos and yet they still moved channel9 videos to Youtube. I wanted readers to pause and think about why they did that. By using Microsoft as an example, I was hoping to break the mental loop of always referring back to "technical issues" as the reason creators choosing Youtube. It's not technical.
- dasil003 7y ago
  Yeah, it’s almost trivial as long as none of those videos get popular...
- ralphstodomingo 7y ago
  Okay, you're clearly missing the point here. Sure, you can upload them videos and put them in a page somewhere, hosted by a web server somewhere. But why would you do that? The cost of keeping your videos accessible are higher than keeping a typical blog accessible. Storage and bandwidth are obvious ones. How do you get ad networks to monetize your videos, if you want to? How'd you get people to discover your videos, as they are not first-class citizens of a search result page? Where do people even watch videos these days? Everything is on Facebook or YouTube. You can somehow self-host your videos, but even if you manage to do so, your original purpose for doing it in the first place won't be met, it simply isn't worth it. Contrast this with Medium, where there are not as many benefits for letting them benefit from your content. Hosting plaintext or markup is trivial, easier to maintain a blog with stuff like Wordpress than to learn how to manage your own server directly to optimize for video. There are a lot of aggregators like HN and Reddit that are populated mostly by blog content, and even if you don't resort to these, your pages are first-class eligible citizens in search results. Heck, even the policy regarding discussions not being actively shown may hurt your specific type of content. Moderation is tolerable with Disqus, for example.

HeavyStorm 7y ago

Well, so is Medium. I can self host a blog but how will people find me? As the OP said, Medium ranks well.

ralphstodomingo 7y ago
It ranks well, but you rarely go on Medium's search bar or feed. I'd usually be here in HN, or Reddit, or some aggregator, where your self-hosted content can be found.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

irrational 7y ago

>if you manager to somehow self-host your videos... Wait, we've been self-hosting our own videos for years. It's not exactly rocket science. YouTube is convenient, but what it is doing from a technical standpoint isn't that difficult to do on your own server.

merpnderp 7y ago
How do you do this? I’ve looked at Digital Ocean and their super cheap bandwidth, but storing a serious amount of data would get expensive.
jasode 7y ago
>It's not exactly rocket science. YouTube is convenient, but what it is doing from a technical standpoint isn't that difficult to do on your own server. You've left several comments in this thread talking down to people as if they're ignorant about how to write an HTML5 <video> tag on their own web server. I wasn't the one that downvoted your comment but for some reason, a lot of technical folks like you misunderstand Youtube and how it enables video uploaders. (A previous commenter misunderstands Youtube the same way and my previous reply to it.[0]) There is no self-hosting web server stack to serve videos that charges $0 to the content creator whether it gets zero or 1 billion views. Therefore, repeatedly recommending "self-host your videos" -- completely misses the point. Consider a corporate giant like Microsoft. Several years ago, they used to self-host their tech videos on channel9.msdn.com.[1] Now they're hosted on Youtube.[2] Obviously, MS is not so technically inept that they don't know how to stream their own videos! They also have billions in cash to prevent "server bandwidth exceeded" errors so cost isn't the issue. Stop and think about why Microsoft switched to Youtube instead of using their own MS Azure infrastructure. As for the other metaphor of "sharecropper" for Youtube that seems popular... is Microsoft a "sharecropper"? Why or why not? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18488275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18488275 [1] clicking any of the new videos on Microsoft's front page will play embedded Youtube videos: https://channel9.msdn.com/ https://channel9.msdn.com/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/user/Microsoft/search?query=build https://www.youtube.com/user/Microsoft/search?query=build
- Faark 7y ago
  Do you have a trustworthy source for MS "switching" to Youtube? Their self hosted videos of Build 2019 [0] is what they directed me to when i was searching for sessions. I later found Youtube versions through some other source as well (probably a link on HN), but this seems more of a PR move ("we don't do evil walled garden anymore") to me than a technical necessity. I do agree with your core message, that video is hard and not something a small player should build their own solution for. But saying video is to hard even for Microsoft seems a bit of a stretch... [0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/build https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/build eg https://mybuild.techcommunity.microsoft.com/sessions/77571 https://mybuild.techcommunity.microsoft.com/sessions/77571
  - ralphstodomingo 7y ago
    If it was a PR move, is "we don't do evil walled garden anymore" more important than "Azure rocks and we do a lot of shit with it, look at this case study"?
  - filmgirlcw 7y ago
    https://www.YouTube.com/MicrosoftDeveloper https://www.YouTube.com/MicrosoftDeveloper has all the Build 2019 videos (and 2018 as well. We still self-host for countries where YouTube isn’t available (or if something goes down), but for Channel 9 anyway[1], we’ve moved to YouTube because that’s where the audience is and it makes sense to be where our users expect us to be. This isn’t about video being hard; our internal player is pretty good and works everywhere (which is not true for YouTube). This was a conscientious decision to go to where our audience is. We still have a self-hosted backup for each video, complete with captions in a variety of languages. But we’d heard repeatedly that our users preferred using YouTube to discover content and not being there didn’t make sense. This isn’t true for all Microsoft content, but for our developer focused videos, we want to be where the community is. [1]: https://channel9.msdn.com https://channel9.msdn.com (I was directly involved in the decision to move our developer content to YouTube.)
  - jasode 7y ago
    >But saying video is to hard even for Microsoft seems a bit of a stretch. I actually said the opposite of that. I emphasized that MS had both the technical skill and money to host their own videos and yet they still moved channel9 videos to Youtube. I wanted readers to pause and think about why they did that. By using Microsoft as an example, I was hoping to break the mental loop of always referring back to "technical issues" as the reason creators choosing Youtube. It's not technical.
dasil003 7y ago
Yeah, it’s almost trivial as long as none of those videos get popular...
ralphstodomingo 7y ago
Okay, you're clearly missing the point here. Sure, you can upload them videos and put them in a page somewhere, hosted by a web server somewhere. But why would you do that? The cost of keeping your videos accessible are higher than keeping a typical blog accessible. Storage and bandwidth are obvious ones. How do you get ad networks to monetize your videos, if you want to? How'd you get people to discover your videos, as they are not first-class citizens of a search result page? Where do people even watch videos these days? Everything is on Facebook or YouTube. You can somehow self-host your videos, but even if you manage to do so, your original purpose for doing it in the first place won't be met, it simply isn't worth it. Contrast this with Medium, where there are not as many benefits for letting them benefit from your content. Hosting plaintext or markup is trivial, easier to maintain a blog with stuff like Wordpress than to learn how to manage your own server directly to optimize for video. There are a lot of aggregators like HN and Reddit that are populated mostly by blog content, and even if you don't resort to these, your pages are first-class eligible citizens in search results. Heck, even the policy regarding discussions not being actively shown may hurt your specific type of content. Moderation is tolerable with Disqus, for example.