4 ms·

The dangerous case of custom hardware making a software business significantly more efficient: This makes disruption and competition even harder.

azurezyq 6y ago
It's inevitable, and this applies to other kinds of optimizations as well. This place is too mature, disruption might be easier elsewhere.
c7DJTLrn 6y ago
What is there to compete for? Video hosting is a money-losing business unless you have exclusives, like Floatplane.
- endless1234 6y ago
  What is floatplane, never heard of it? Seemingly an yt competitor by a somewhat popular youtuber. App on Android has "10k+" installs. Isn't it _way_ too early to say it wouldn't be a money losing business?
  - oblio 6y ago
    My guess is that the commenter is either a Floatplane insider or possibly just optimistic :-)
  - throwaway3699 6y ago
    Think of Floatplane as more of a Patreon competitor with a video component, than a YouTube competitor.
  - bobsmooth 6y ago
    Linus' goal for Floatplane is "If it doesn't fly, it'll at least float." There's only 20 creators on it and it's intended to compliment YouTube, not replace it.
- human_error 6y ago
  What's floatplane? Hadn't heard of it. The website doesn't say much.
  - pcmill 6y ago
    Floatplane is a video service built by the people behind the popular Youtube channel LinusTechTips. It is not a direct competitor to Youtube though. The platform makes it easier to let paying fans get videos earlier but it is not meant to build an audience.
fancyfredbot 6y ago
This will keep costs down but I am not sure cost of transcoding is the major barrier to entry? I think the network effect (everyone is on YouTube) had already made disruption pretty difficult!
- NicoJuicy 6y ago
  Depends how you look at it. There could be someone making these chips and then a competitor with lower startup costs than before.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  Things like youtube run on super-thin margins. Bandwidth and storage costs are massive, compute costs quite big, and ad revenue really quite low. A competitor would need either a different model to keep costs low (limit video length/quality, the vimeo model of forcing creators to pay, or go for the netflix-like model of having a very limited library), or very deep pockets to run at a loss until they reach youtube-scale. I'm still mystified how tiktok apparently manage to turn a profit. I have a feeling they are using the 'deep pockets' approach, although the short video format might also bring in more ad revenue per hour of video stored/transcoded/served.
Traster 6y ago
To be honest I suspect it isn't actually a differentiator. It's good for Google that they can produce this chip and trim their hardware costs by some percentage, but it's not going to give them a competitive advantage in the market of video sharing. Especially in a business like youtube with network effects, getting the audience is the difficult bit, the technical solutions are interesting but you're not going to beat google by having 5% cheaper encoding costs.
ant6n 6y ago
Perhaps. But the big issues for YouTube right now isnt efficiency per se, but copyright, monetization, ai-tagging, social clout. If a YouTube competitor can get the content creators and offer them viewers, competition could perhaps work. This fight is probably not fought at the margins of hardware optimization.
mrtksn 6y ago
It's like crystallisation of the software. When you decide that this is the best version of an algorithm, you make a hardware that is extremely efficient in running that algorithm. It probably means that, unless you have a groundbreaking algorithm on something that is available as hardware, you simply do software on something that is not "perfected". It trims marginal improvements.
CyberRabbi 6y ago
Usually competition for a general platform like YouTube comes in the form of unbundling and in that case these last mile optimizations will matter little.
- narrator 6y ago
  The main competitors to YouTube are the sites that have non-illegal content that YouTube won't host. e.g: Porn and controversial political stuff.
  - CyberRabbi 6y ago
    That might be true but I think sites like odyssey are more popular than controversial political video sites.
wishysgb 6y ago
as long as you can buy the parts or have the HDL to deploy it on an FPGA you should be fine
blihp 6y ago
It's the seemingly infinite bandwidth that Google throws at YouTube that make competition hard. Then there's the inability to monetize. Transcoding is probably about 20th on the list of issues.
yuhong 6y ago
I wonder what the WMF will do when the H.264 patents expire and all these videos needs to be transcoded.

azurezyq 6y ago

It's inevitable, and this applies to other kinds of optimizations as well. This place is too mature, disruption might be easier elsewhere.

c7DJTLrn 6y ago

What is there to compete for? Video hosting is a money-losing business unless you have exclusives, like Floatplane.

endless1234 6y ago
What is floatplane, never heard of it? Seemingly an yt competitor by a somewhat popular youtuber. App on Android has "10k+" installs. Isn't it _way_ too early to say it wouldn't be a money losing business?
- oblio 6y ago
  My guess is that the commenter is either a Floatplane insider or possibly just optimistic :-)
- throwaway3699 6y ago
  Think of Floatplane as more of a Patreon competitor with a video component, than a YouTube competitor.
- bobsmooth 6y ago
  Linus' goal for Floatplane is "If it doesn't fly, it'll at least float." There's only 20 creators on it and it's intended to compliment YouTube, not replace it.
human_error 6y ago
What's floatplane? Hadn't heard of it. The website doesn't say much.
- pcmill 6y ago
  Floatplane is a video service built by the people behind the popular Youtube channel LinusTechTips. It is not a direct competitor to Youtube though. The platform makes it easier to let paying fans get videos earlier but it is not meant to build an audience.

fancyfredbot 6y ago

This will keep costs down but I am not sure cost of transcoding is the major barrier to entry? I think the network effect (everyone is on YouTube) had already made disruption pretty difficult!

NicoJuicy 6y ago
Depends how you look at it. There could be someone making these chips and then a competitor with lower startup costs than before.
londons_explore 6y ago
Things like youtube run on super-thin margins. Bandwidth and storage costs are massive, compute costs quite big, and ad revenue really quite low. A competitor would need either a different model to keep costs low (limit video length/quality, the vimeo model of forcing creators to pay, or go for the netflix-like model of having a very limited library), or very deep pockets to run at a loss until they reach youtube-scale. I'm still mystified how tiktok apparently manage to turn a profit. I have a feeling they are using the 'deep pockets' approach, although the short video format might also bring in more ad revenue per hour of video stored/transcoded/served.

Traster 6y ago

To be honest I suspect it isn't actually a differentiator. It's good for Google that they can produce this chip and trim their hardware costs by some percentage, but it's not going to give them a competitive advantage in the market of video sharing. Especially in a business like youtube with network effects, getting the audience is the difficult bit, the technical solutions are interesting but you're not going to beat google by having 5% cheaper encoding costs.

ant6n 6y ago

Perhaps. But the big issues for YouTube right now isnt efficiency per se, but copyright, monetization, ai-tagging, social clout. If a YouTube competitor can get the content creators and offer them viewers, competition could perhaps work. This fight is probably not fought at the margins of hardware optimization.

mrtksn 6y ago

It's like crystallisation of the software. When you decide that this is the best version of an algorithm, you make a hardware that is extremely efficient in running that algorithm. It probably means that, unless you have a groundbreaking algorithm on something that is available as hardware, you simply do software on something that is not "perfected". It trims marginal improvements.

CyberRabbi 6y ago

Usually competition for a general platform like YouTube comes in the form of unbundling and in that case these last mile optimizations will matter little.

narrator 6y ago
The main competitors to YouTube are the sites that have non-illegal content that YouTube won't host. e.g: Porn and controversial political stuff.
- CyberRabbi 6y ago
  That might be true but I think sites like odyssey are more popular than controversial political video sites.

wishysgb 6y ago

as long as you can buy the parts or have the HDL to deploy it on an FPGA you should be fine

blihp 6y ago

It's the seemingly infinite bandwidth that Google throws at YouTube that make competition hard. Then there's the inability to monetize. Transcoding is probably about 20th on the list of issues.

yuhong 6y ago

I wonder what the WMF will do when the H.264 patents expire and all these videos needs to be transcoded.