3 ms·

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 m

• NicoJuicy 5y 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 5y 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.