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YouTube is a huge technical achievement that would require billions of dollars to replicate: 1. It consumes nearly unlimited bandwidth. 2. It consumes nearly

YouTube is a huge technical achievement that would require billions of dollars to replicate: 1. It consumes nearly unlimited bandwidth. 2. It consumes nearly unlimited CPU for transcoding and serving media at different bitrates. 3. It consumes massive resources to police, from user moderation to appeasing content owners by building systems and databases like ContentID, etc. 4. It generates endless PR and legal headaches, which also costs a lot of money. 5. A huge amount of work has gone into getting users hooked through algorithms that seek to maximize watch time. 6. A huge amount of work has gone into building a network of advertisers who want to pay to put their ads on the platform. 7. And importantly, a huge amount of work has gone into building up an ecosystem of video producers who make their entire living off of YouTube and spend countless hours producing content for them at no cost to YouTube. Obviously YouTube isn't giving out Golden Play Button plaques out of the kindness of their heart. That's marketing. And despite all this, Youtube almost always works perfectly for almost all users. People click on their phones and the videos just play - all around the world, even while traveling on transit, etc. There are very few companies who have the resources to attempt to compete with that. Vimeo has obviously given up targeting the same mass market audience. Other competitors without unlimited deep pockets can't seem to make a dent. It's a lot like asking why doesn't someone just make "a better Google." Unless you have unlimited resources and an unlimited budget, it probably isn't possible. It's smarter to make something else tangental in video that can outcompete Google instead of facing them head on. See: Twitch, TikTok, etc.

jimmaswell 5y ago
Sounds like PornHub or similar could easily branch into providing a separate service for general videos if they wanted. They already have all this stuff down for the most part.
- Zanni 5y ago
  They may not have to even offer a separate service. There's a math tutor sharing his lessons on PornHub already: https://www.vice.com/en/article/dyp8wa/math-tutor-video-lessons-pornhub-changhsu https://www.vice.com/en/article/dyp8wa/math-tutor-video-less...
  - gizdan 5y ago
    Sure, but, assuming it's not already blocked by IT, are you going to be sending out a link to your colleagues/students/professor with the name "pornhub" in the URL?
  - dangoljames 5y ago
    Brilliant.
  - frosted-flakes 5y ago
    That was a marketing strategy though. It says in the article that he doesn't post their anymore and only did it to attract attention.
- snek_case 5y ago
  You're right that Netflix and Pornhub have both been able to replicate this. IMO, it might be wise for Netflix to start their own YouTube-like service. For example, subscribe to Netflix, get access to user-created videos on a separate app. The best part is that users would then generate content for a fraction of what they currently pay to produce content, and they could have basically what YouTube has, but ad-free.
  - Hekioi 5y ago
    Netflix only provides one very static huge library. As long as you move a few PB around the globe on your video release date, Netflix is fine. It's very easy to build a Netflix in comparison to yt. I would argue that for Netflix going into yt direction would eat up there revenue baseline fast.
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      Netflix could square the circle by offering "YT for indie filmmakers." More static content than YT. Better viewer:creator ratio. Fewer content headaches. Content moderation is lower volume and amounts to watching the film. And closer to their existing product fit. It's actually kind of mind-boggling that Netflix hasn't pivoted into a turnkey solution (standard deal + optional financing support + broadcast platform) for mass-market film-making. Everyone's content starved, it's an obvious weakness that Amazon / Disney / ATT are blind to, and somehow Reed Hastings hasn't pushed in that direction. It's literally what Netflix is famous for doing (twice!): be the platform.
      - SahAssar 5y ago
        > Everyone's content starved I've been mostly hearing the opposite, most people feel like they have more content they want to watch than they have time to.
      - hazza_n_dazza 5y ago
        great idea, however I think they would become more like a hosting company with more overheads - so probably better for them to stick to their higher margin service they offer now. also, i bet they doo offer something like "(standard deal + optional financing support + broadcast platform) for mass-market film-making." just not to everyone
- Hekioi 5y ago
  I don't think ph has any relevant similarity to yt. Video quality is low. Video amount should probably be 1000 if not 10000 smaller than yt. I'm not aware of millions uploading hour and hours of high quality videos to their platform. I myself only go there for a short period of time. I know plenty of people who keep streams from yt running in parallel.
- bakuninsbart 5y ago
  Pornhubs parent-company MindGeek can only be described as shady. [0] As a privately held company, they might also have problems raising the necessary funds for such a large expansion. And of course, there is still a pretty large stigma attached to pornography, so content creators might be a bit shy to associate with them. [0] MindGeek operates under a complex structure of multiple companies in countries such as the British Virgin Islands, Canada, Curaçao, Cyprus, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, Mauritius, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States.[60][8] Its structure has been described as mostly a way to avoid corporate tax by a de facto Canadian company;[8][3][61] with billing companies in Ireland,[62] subsidiaries in Curaçao and holding ones in Cyprus and Luxembourg, all countries that have been identified as tax havens or having lax tax regulations. Canada also has special tax treaties with Luxembourg, the legal headquarters of MindGeek, where a Canadian subsidiary is exempt from taxes paid on royalties to its Luxembourg parent.[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MindGeek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MindGeek
- JeremyNT 5y ago
  > Sounds like PornHub or similar could easily branch into providing a separate service for general videos if they wanted. They already have all this stuff down for the most part. The key part there is "if they wanted." Any upstart would have to burn who knows how much capital to try and ramp up, hosting videos for free and getting only a tiny fraction of the ad revenue that Google can extract from a video due to their smaller scale. Even if somebody wanted to subsidize this with reserves or VC funding, the endgame is that they're competing directly against Google, and if faced with actual competition Google can always afford to undercut them until they ran out of reserves or VC funding. Far better for these sites to claim a niche that Google has no interest in and just fly below the radar.
foofoo4u 5y ago
To add to this list, YouTube does an excellent job on its core competency — streaming high quality video without hickups and buffering. I've tried other video streaming services before, and none of them have the reliability as youtube. When I click a youtube video, I know it'll play immediately and throughout the video without buffering or hanging. I don't have the same confidence as other providers.
systemvoltage 5y ago
This is the least informative hyperbole I've read on HN. It's a bunch of smoke and mirrors, everything is unlimited, cannot be replicated, forget about it. Let's accept defeat. I thought HN was the opposite of this - finding ways to upend fat companies from occupying monopoly positions. "Hacker" news. More reasons to break up Big Tech from a government regulations perspective - The only democratic politician talking about it is Elizabeth Warren. But many are upending large incumbents without gov reg - Stripe ("Increase the GDP of the internet") and Square in payments/ecommerce space. Tesla taking on Big 4. I would like to see a real competitor for Google search. Perhaps Algolia? Their search is incredible on HN.
- jonas21 5y ago
  Are Stripe, Square, and Tesla not big tech? They have market caps of $95B, $88B, and $1.05T, respectively. And is YouTube not upending the incumbents (TV and traditional media) in the same way that they are?
- ethbr0 5y ago
  It's a two-sided coin. It's not a very smart bet to say "I can out-compete a US$182.53 billion revenue company... by doing things that require massive amounts of capital."
mrkramer 5y ago
>YouTube is a huge technical achievement that would require billions of dollars to replicate. YouTube achieved this in 15 years time with the help of Google's enormous resources. YouTube competitor would need to have some innovation that is hard for YouTube to replicate. Funny enough TikTok was able to replicate YouTube in a few years time but only for short videos so it shows you don't need all that what you mentioned. Innovation is what you need.
throwthewebaway 5y ago
All these can easily be solved by web3
bkovacev 5y ago
Not to downplay the tech, but you could replicate majority of the tech nowadays with proper engineering effort, proper timeline and a budget. YouTube competitor would need to beat them in the business side of things, which is extremely hard, however not unachievable. The company would need to have proper monetization, proper support with proper appeal system and to enable producers to create high quality content without the fear of their accounts being banned. I believe this would be sufficient enough to start making a dent in the YouTube creator base.
- vineyardmike 5y ago
  > to enable producers to create high quality content Isn't this the MO of vimeo? Target higher quality content, and allow pay-per-hosting to avoid ads?
- NoPicklez 5y ago
  "proper engineering effort, proper timeline and a budget" Like all things? The proper engineering effort is hard to find in such a capacity and a budget to do all of this is overwhelming for most tech companies to attempt where an ROI can be seen within tolerable risk. It's like saying we could live on mars if we had "proper engineering effort, timeline and budget".
clairity 5y ago
you offer a largely technical[0] answer to a business (and a politicoeconomic) problem. this is a common perspective bias of tech-focused folks of all stripes, and leads to incorrect, or at least incomplete, solutions to the problems faced by businesses. some of those technical aspects support youtube's strategy of dominating the online video provider market, but none of them are (even collectively) the reason why youtube dominates. for instance, vimeo has all of those to some degree and doesn't dominate the market. youtube's strategy (e.g., 'the reason') was to leverage google's resources to undermine the revenue-making opportunities of the whole market so that it could outlast them to domination. it used google's (monopolistic) advantages in search and online advertising, as well as its capital warchest, to effect this strategy. that warchest, for instance, allowed it to offer free hosting/streaming, something that was difficult for smaller players to do. google's dominance in search allowed it to offer premium advertising to youtube videos. google's dominance in online advertising (again, monopolistically) gave youtube an advantage in monetization and targeting. in short, this wasn't a story of a scrappy competitor overcoming the odds to become the market leader. it was hoarded capital and monopoly advantage being deployed to corner another market. that is, it was an (unprosecuted) anti-trust violation. [0]: note the broader connotation of 'technical', not limited to just technology
- sushid 5y ago
  No one is asking how Youtube got there. The question is, how can you complete with it and I believe the above commenter gave a very reasonable answer. Your side point about it supposedly being an anti-trust violation isn't even a proper answer to the question.
  - clairity 5y ago
    the parent comment was a list of technical attributes about how youtube got there (used as rationale for why it's impossible to compete). i countered that that's not how it got there, as it's emphasizing tactics, not strategy. it's hard to formulate a coherent competitive strategy if you entirely misunderstand your competitor's successful (if anti-competitive) strategy. it's like playing chess by focusing on taking all the pawns rather than the king.
Jugurtha 5y ago
>And despite all this, Youtube almost always works perfectly for almost all users. People click on their phones and the videos just play - all around the world, even while traveling on transit, etc. Yes! I find any other video website that is not YouTube to be simply unusable. Don't get me started with Spotify's video player. My thought when I see a website using anything else: just put the damn thing on YouTube! The players suck, the experience suck, everything sucks on other products.
ChristopherDrum 5y ago
This actually kind of depresses me, how certain technologies are so entrenched and require so much effort/resources to compete against as to render the entrenched technology as the one and only that we can ever have (for all practical purposes). I feel particulary depressed about this considering how YOUNG the tech industry is, and how stagnant things become when the winners are decided so early.
muzani 5y ago
There's plenty of free porn sites that didn't require billions of dollars to do and they were subject to all of the above restrictions.

jimmaswell 5y ago

Sounds like PornHub or similar could easily branch into providing a separate service for general videos if they wanted. They already have all this stuff down for the most part.

Zanni 5y ago
They may not have to even offer a separate service. There's a math tutor sharing his lessons on PornHub already: https://www.vice.com/en/article/dyp8wa/math-tutor-video-lessons-pornhub-changhsu https://www.vice.com/en/article/dyp8wa/math-tutor-video-less...
- gizdan 5y ago
  Sure, but, assuming it's not already blocked by IT, are you going to be sending out a link to your colleagues/students/professor with the name "pornhub" in the URL?
- dangoljames 5y ago
  Brilliant.
- frosted-flakes 5y ago
  That was a marketing strategy though. It says in the article that he doesn't post their anymore and only did it to attract attention.
snek_case 5y ago
You're right that Netflix and Pornhub have both been able to replicate this. IMO, it might be wise for Netflix to start their own YouTube-like service. For example, subscribe to Netflix, get access to user-created videos on a separate app. The best part is that users would then generate content for a fraction of what they currently pay to produce content, and they could have basically what YouTube has, but ad-free.
- Hekioi 5y ago
  Netflix only provides one very static huge library. As long as you move a few PB around the globe on your video release date, Netflix is fine. It's very easy to build a Netflix in comparison to yt. I would argue that for Netflix going into yt direction would eat up there revenue baseline fast.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    Netflix could square the circle by offering "YT for indie filmmakers." More static content than YT. Better viewer:creator ratio. Fewer content headaches. Content moderation is lower volume and amounts to watching the film. And closer to their existing product fit. It's actually kind of mind-boggling that Netflix hasn't pivoted into a turnkey solution (standard deal + optional financing support + broadcast platform) for mass-market film-making. Everyone's content starved, it's an obvious weakness that Amazon / Disney / ATT are blind to, and somehow Reed Hastings hasn't pushed in that direction. It's literally what Netflix is famous for doing (twice!): be the platform.
    - SahAssar 5y ago
      > Everyone's content starved I've been mostly hearing the opposite, most people feel like they have more content they want to watch than they have time to.
    - hazza_n_dazza 5y ago
      great idea, however I think they would become more like a hosting company with more overheads - so probably better for them to stick to their higher margin service they offer now. also, i bet they doo offer something like "(standard deal + optional financing support + broadcast platform) for mass-market film-making." just not to everyone
Hekioi 5y ago
I don't think ph has any relevant similarity to yt. Video quality is low. Video amount should probably be 1000 if not 10000 smaller than yt. I'm not aware of millions uploading hour and hours of high quality videos to their platform. I myself only go there for a short period of time. I know plenty of people who keep streams from yt running in parallel.
bakuninsbart 5y ago
Pornhubs parent-company MindGeek can only be described as shady. [0] As a privately held company, they might also have problems raising the necessary funds for such a large expansion. And of course, there is still a pretty large stigma attached to pornography, so content creators might be a bit shy to associate with them. [0] MindGeek operates under a complex structure of multiple companies in countries such as the British Virgin Islands, Canada, Curaçao, Cyprus, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, Mauritius, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States.[60][8] Its structure has been described as mostly a way to avoid corporate tax by a de facto Canadian company;[8][3][61] with billing companies in Ireland,[62] subsidiaries in Curaçao and holding ones in Cyprus and Luxembourg, all countries that have been identified as tax havens or having lax tax regulations. Canada also has special tax treaties with Luxembourg, the legal headquarters of MindGeek, where a Canadian subsidiary is exempt from taxes paid on royalties to its Luxembourg parent.[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MindGeek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MindGeek
JeremyNT 5y ago
> Sounds like PornHub or similar could easily branch into providing a separate service for general videos if they wanted. They already have all this stuff down for the most part. The key part there is "if they wanted." Any upstart would have to burn who knows how much capital to try and ramp up, hosting videos for free and getting only a tiny fraction of the ad revenue that Google can extract from a video due to their smaller scale. Even if somebody wanted to subsidize this with reserves or VC funding, the endgame is that they're competing directly against Google, and if faced with actual competition Google can always afford to undercut them until they ran out of reserves or VC funding. Far better for these sites to claim a niche that Google has no interest in and just fly below the radar.

foofoo4u 5y ago

To add to this list, YouTube does an excellent job on its core competency — streaming high quality video without hickups and buffering. I've tried other video streaming services before, and none of them have the reliability as youtube. When I click a youtube video, I know it'll play immediately and throughout the video without buffering or hanging. I don't have the same confidence as other providers.

systemvoltage 5y ago

This is the least informative hyperbole I've read on HN. It's a bunch of smoke and mirrors, everything is unlimited, cannot be replicated, forget about it. Let's accept defeat. I thought HN was the opposite of this - finding ways to upend fat companies from occupying monopoly positions. "Hacker" news. More reasons to break up Big Tech from a government regulations perspective - The only democratic politician talking about it is Elizabeth Warren. But many are upending large incumbents without gov reg - Stripe ("Increase the GDP of the internet") and Square in payments/ecommerce space. Tesla taking on Big 4. I would like to see a real competitor for Google search. Perhaps Algolia? Their search is incredible on HN.

jonas21 5y ago
Are Stripe, Square, and Tesla not big tech? They have market caps of $95B, $88B, and $1.05T, respectively. And is YouTube not upending the incumbents (TV and traditional media) in the same way that they are?
ethbr0 5y ago
It's a two-sided coin. It's not a very smart bet to say "I can out-compete a US$182.53 billion revenue company... by doing things that require massive amounts of capital."

mrkramer 5y ago

>YouTube is a huge technical achievement that would require billions of dollars to replicate. YouTube achieved this in 15 years time with the help of Google's enormous resources. YouTube competitor would need to have some innovation that is hard for YouTube to replicate. Funny enough TikTok was able to replicate YouTube in a few years time but only for short videos so it shows you don't need all that what you mentioned. Innovation is what you need.

throwthewebaway 5y ago

All these can easily be solved by web3

bkovacev 5y ago

Not to downplay the tech, but you could replicate majority of the tech nowadays with proper engineering effort, proper timeline and a budget. YouTube competitor would need to beat them in the business side of things, which is extremely hard, however not unachievable. The company would need to have proper monetization, proper support with proper appeal system and to enable producers to create high quality content without the fear of their accounts being banned. I believe this would be sufficient enough to start making a dent in the YouTube creator base.

vineyardmike 5y ago
> to enable producers to create high quality content Isn't this the MO of vimeo? Target higher quality content, and allow pay-per-hosting to avoid ads?
NoPicklez 5y ago
"proper engineering effort, proper timeline and a budget" Like all things? The proper engineering effort is hard to find in such a capacity and a budget to do all of this is overwhelming for most tech companies to attempt where an ROI can be seen within tolerable risk. It's like saying we could live on mars if we had "proper engineering effort, timeline and budget".

clairity 5y ago

you offer a largely technical[0] answer to a business (and a politicoeconomic) problem. this is a common perspective bias of tech-focused folks of all stripes, and leads to incorrect, or at least incomplete, solutions to the problems faced by businesses. some of those technical aspects support youtube's strategy of dominating the online video provider market, but none of them are (even collectively) the reason why youtube dominates. for instance, vimeo has all of those to some degree and doesn't dominate the market. youtube's strategy (e.g., 'the reason') was to leverage google's resources to undermine the revenue-making opportunities of the whole market so that it could outlast them to domination. it used google's (monopolistic) advantages in search and online advertising, as well as its capital warchest, to effect this strategy. that warchest, for instance, allowed it to offer free hosting/streaming, something that was difficult for smaller players to do. google's dominance in search allowed it to offer premium advertising to youtube videos. google's dominance in online advertising (again, monopolistically) gave youtube an advantage in monetization and targeting. in short, this wasn't a story of a scrappy competitor overcoming the odds to become the market leader. it was hoarded capital and monopoly advantage being deployed to corner another market. that is, it was an (unprosecuted) anti-trust violation. [0]: note the broader connotation of 'technical', not limited to just technology

sushid 5y ago
No one is asking how Youtube got there. The question is, how can you complete with it and I believe the above commenter gave a very reasonable answer. Your side point about it supposedly being an anti-trust violation isn't even a proper answer to the question.
- clairity 5y ago
  the parent comment was a list of technical attributes about how youtube got there (used as rationale for why it's impossible to compete). i countered that that's not how it got there, as it's emphasizing tactics, not strategy. it's hard to formulate a coherent competitive strategy if you entirely misunderstand your competitor's successful (if anti-competitive) strategy. it's like playing chess by focusing on taking all the pawns rather than the king.

Jugurtha 5y ago

>And despite all this, Youtube almost always works perfectly for almost all users. People click on their phones and the videos just play - all around the world, even while traveling on transit, etc. Yes! I find any other video website that is not YouTube to be simply unusable. Don't get me started with Spotify's video player. My thought when I see a website using anything else: just put the damn thing on YouTube! The players suck, the experience suck, everything sucks on other products.

ChristopherDrum 5y ago

This actually kind of depresses me, how certain technologies are so entrenched and require so much effort/resources to compete against as to render the entrenched technology as the one and only that we can ever have (for all practical purposes). I feel particulary depressed about this considering how YOUNG the tech industry is, and how stagnant things become when the winners are decided so early.

muzani 5y ago

There's plenty of free porn sites that didn't require billions of dollars to do and they were subject to all of the above restrictions.