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I don’t really see how the cost of bandwidth is the main factor. What would change by lowering said cost? The corporations of the oligopoly would also benefit a

I don’t really see how the cost of bandwidth is the main factor. What would change by lowering said cost? The corporations of the oligopoly would also benefit and I feel they would just have larger margins allowing them to keep their dominance. I’m no expert though, so I’m more curious than in disagreement.

codegladiator 7y ago
a 49 mb video watched a million times is 49 tb bandwidth. 1 tb bandwidth cost of aws is 236 usd a month.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
  I don't think that's quite right. 1TB/mo of CloudFront bandwidth is $90/mo (per [1]). Also, that's the on-demand price. The price with volume discounts is much lower. [1]: https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html#s=CloudFront&key=files/calc-211d62e4e5e937ad6f991d2a82acc72a776b3e0f&v=ver20191121vC https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html#s=CloudFront&...
  - codegladiator 7y ago
    I guess sure even with your calculation that is still a considerable expense while on youtube the user might be getting some money for their video
- zaroth 7y ago
  A 10Gbit connection at HE is going to cost you roughly $2,000/month, or about $65/day. That will serve your 49MB video roughly 2 million times a day. Let’s go with 50% average utilization, and say that means we need to monetize roughly 0.0065 cents per view to cover the bandwidth cost. I think YouTube charges something like 10 cents per ad view, but won’t charge if the user clicks Skip in that 5 second window. I’m not sure what percent of views result in a billable ad, but anecdotally I’ve heard it’s surprisingly high. I would assume storage is a much bigger cost factor, to say nothing of paying the engineers to develop and support the infrastructure.
cameronbrown 7y ago
IMO the main reason a YouTube competitor fails to spawn is bandwidth costs and lack of advertisers making it immediately really unprofitable.
- bogwog 7y ago
  Have you researched this, or are you making assumptions? Hosting videos is pretty cheap, and while getting the same amount of traffic as Youtube would get very costly very fast, it could also be very profitable if monetization is done right. Plus technologies like PeerTube can significantly reduce bandwidth expenses if that's really an issue. Google wouldn't use something like that because the federation threatens their monopoly, but a competitor with a different business model definitely could make it work for them.
  - icebraining 7y ago
    > Google wouldn't use something like that because the federation threatens their monopoly They don't need to, they have caching servers on most ISP's internal networks. Popular stuff (that consumes most bandwidth) just needs to be sent once from the mothership.
- MaxBarraclough 7y ago
  Bandwidth isn't really the problem. Vimeo exists, and they serve considerably higher bitrates than YouTube. The problem is that YouTube is entrenched, and has network effects on its side. A fresh new competitor to YouTube would face a combination of a lack of advertisers, and a lack of content seeking ad-funding. On the other hand, when it comes to pay-to-watch content, there's space in the market for new competitors to arise, as the network effects are less significant there. https://rakuten.tv/ https://rakuten.tv/ and https://chili.com/ https://chili.com/ for instance, are far smaller than Amazon and Google. I guess bandwidth costs are, in a sense, the problem. If if were easy to run a very-large-scale video-hosting site, that would help, sure. Ads wouldn't have to be worth much to make the business work. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-sided_market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-sided_market

codegladiator 7y ago

a 49 mb video watched a million times is 49 tb bandwidth. 1 tb bandwidth cost of aws is 236 usd a month.

asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
I don't think that's quite right. 1TB/mo of CloudFront bandwidth is $90/mo (per [1]). Also, that's the on-demand price. The price with volume discounts is much lower. [1]: https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html#s=CloudFront&key=files/calc-211d62e4e5e937ad6f991d2a82acc72a776b3e0f&v=ver20191121vC https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html#s=CloudFront&...
- codegladiator 7y ago
  I guess sure even with your calculation that is still a considerable expense while on youtube the user might be getting some money for their video
zaroth 7y ago
A 10Gbit connection at HE is going to cost you roughly $2,000/month, or about $65/day. That will serve your 49MB video roughly 2 million times a day. Let’s go with 50% average utilization, and say that means we need to monetize roughly 0.0065 cents per view to cover the bandwidth cost. I think YouTube charges something like 10 cents per ad view, but won’t charge if the user clicks Skip in that 5 second window. I’m not sure what percent of views result in a billable ad, but anecdotally I’ve heard it’s surprisingly high. I would assume storage is a much bigger cost factor, to say nothing of paying the engineers to develop and support the infrastructure.

cameronbrown 7y ago

IMO the main reason a YouTube competitor fails to spawn is bandwidth costs and lack of advertisers making it immediately really unprofitable.

bogwog 7y ago
Have you researched this, or are you making assumptions? Hosting videos is pretty cheap, and while getting the same amount of traffic as Youtube would get very costly very fast, it could also be very profitable if monetization is done right. Plus technologies like PeerTube can significantly reduce bandwidth expenses if that's really an issue. Google wouldn't use something like that because the federation threatens their monopoly, but a competitor with a different business model definitely could make it work for them.
- icebraining 7y ago
  > Google wouldn't use something like that because the federation threatens their monopoly They don't need to, they have caching servers on most ISP's internal networks. Popular stuff (that consumes most bandwidth) just needs to be sent once from the mothership.
MaxBarraclough 7y ago
Bandwidth isn't really the problem. Vimeo exists, and they serve considerably higher bitrates than YouTube. The problem is that YouTube is entrenched, and has network effects on its side. A fresh new competitor to YouTube would face a combination of a lack of advertisers, and a lack of content seeking ad-funding. On the other hand, when it comes to pay-to-watch content, there's space in the market for new competitors to arise, as the network effects are less significant there. https://rakuten.tv/ https://rakuten.tv/ and https://chili.com/ https://chili.com/ for instance, are far smaller than Amazon and Google. I guess bandwidth costs are, in a sense, the problem. If if were easy to run a very-large-scale video-hosting site, that would help, sure. Ads wouldn't have to be worth much to make the business work. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-sided_market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-sided_market