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> As a society, we may need a platform where educational/government institutions can upload content (with content warnings, if necessary) because Youtube is a t

• Terry_Roll 4y ago
  > You are on their platform, with their rules, where their algorithm is judge, jury and executioner. Sounds like a Govt's.
• frereubu 4y ago
  When I see a comment on HN that says someone "just" needs to do something I always wince. There are so many things to consider here, even if universities weren't the bureaucratic labyrinth that they are. Quite apart from the discovery aspect of being on YouTube, where people already on YouTube are much more likely to stumble across Cornell videos when using certain search terms, it wouldn't "just" be spinning up a single server - it would involve all sorts of stuff like encoding videos, bandwidth detection, load balancing etc. etc. I'm not saying this might not be a good thing to do, particularly as a backup if their YouTube channel gets taken down for some reason, but it's almost never as simple as "just" doing something. I'd encourage anyone who catches themselves writing "just" in a sentence to have a deeper think about why a person or organisation isn't doing that.
  • alar44 4y ago
    None of that is difficult, especially for a University, sorry.
    • hnthrow1010 4y ago
      What exactly do you mean? Say the university hired you to do the job, I assume you have a budget & headcount ready?
      • alar44 4y ago
        For a fileshare? What exactly is the challenge here? Bandwidth might be, but most colleges probably have a pretty solid fiber connection.
    • frereubu 4y ago
      Have you worked in a university before, in a capacity where you had to get something like that signed off?
      • alar44 4y ago
        I've worked for university sized companies. I'm not sure why setting up a fileshare would be difficult. What's to sign off on? Space and a couple VMs? Red tape aside, I don't see the challenge.
        • frereubu 4y ago
          I don't say this sarcastically, genuinely, but when you've worked in a university I imagine you'd have a very different view of something like this. I've worked in three - all in the UK, so I suppose that might make a difference - and the bureaucracy can be positively Byzantine. On top of just getting approval for the service, which could involve you in meetings where people split hairs to the point you're having conversations about semantics that would make Wittengstien weep, you now have to persuade a whole load of different departments to use your internal service over just them sticking their own stuff on YouTube. A university isn't a single, cohesive organisation, it's a collective of disparate organisational units, all with different agendas, and each of those organisational units has it's own internal struggles. It gets very political - in the broadest sense.
          • Closi 4y ago
            Well if your reasoning is that you can only ever use YouTube because you can only ever use YouTube then I guess you can only ever use YouTube.
      • Closi 4y ago
        > Have you worked in a university before, in a capacity where you had to get something like that signed off? Bureaucracy isn’t a compelling excuse - that’s just an easy way to dismiss anything. Universities have absolutely managed more complex IT change than hosting a few videos on their website. But we are going to complain that a universities videos got taken down because of YouTube bureaucracy but universities can’t host their own videos because of their own internal bureaucracy then I have very little pity!
    • znpy 4y ago
      That’s even more true for american high profile university and their deep pockets. They likely already have datacenters and high bandwidth internet connections (multiple). Oh and they also have staff already on the payroll, and likely capable students that could lend a hand as a part time job or something. Not to mention, the role of big corporations could be reduced to cdn only, for example (tink of google cdn, cloudfront or cloudflare). It just take willingness to actually address the problem.
      • alar44 4y ago
        My thoughts exactly. The systems already probably exist for easily creating and deploying VMs, identity management, etc. In 2022 that's pretty turnkey stuff for a University.
  • singhrac 4y ago
    Is there white-label open source (i.e. host it yourself) video hosting services like Vimeo / Mux / YouTube / NetFlix? The closest I found was NodeTube but I think it would need a UX/UI redesign before govts or universities would be ready to deploy it on their own. Fwiw, universities have long paid for their own white label YouTube clones from various companies; at a bare minimum Canvas has been around forever. It just wasn't free (as in beer or otherwise).
    • moviuro 4y ago
      There's peertube [0], which was built to defend against arbitrary censorship. > PeerTube aspires to be a decentralized and free/libre alternative to video broadcasting services. > [...] > Anyone with a modicum of technical skills can host a PeerTube server, aka an instance. Each instance hosts its users and their videos. In this way, every instance is created, moderated and maintained independently by various administrators. [0] https://joinpeertube.org/ https://joinpeertube.org/
    • theossuary 4y ago
      There's Odysee based on LBRY, but I don't know if LBRY is here to stay. It's hard to tell with new Blockchains like that. I have to imagine running a node is expensive too. [1]: https://odysee.com/ https://odysee.com/ [2]: https://lbry.com/ https://lbry.com/
  • travisgriggs 4y ago
    My issue is that there was a time when it was a lot closer to "just" than it is now. I agree it's always more complex than we realize. But what frustrates me is that that almost has become a justification (pun) to justify (pun) not spending the effort to make it so that can be "just".
• f6v 4y ago
  > These institutions are big enough to host their own videos - we don't need a new platform, they just need to spin up a server and to pay for their own bandwidth. That’s why companies emerge - people don’t want to acquire specialized skills. And that’s why as a technology manager I choose to buy over building more often than not.
• bombcar 4y ago
  Is there a quick-and-easy "Wordpress with video player" setup you can add to a VPS to get something akin to the quality of the Youtube player (ignoring CDNs or anything just the basic start/stop/play)? Or in other words, assuming I have a ten minute video I want to make available, how do I go about it rather than "throw on YouTube, add to page"?
  • dfinninger 4y ago
    It looks like Wordpress may be the solution: https://wpengine.com/resources/wordpress-video-embed-how-to/ https://wpengine.com/resources/wordpress-video-embed-how-to/ I’ve never used it, but they make it sound like just a few clicks.
    • lupire 4y ago
      That's embedding (linking) remote video, not hosting.
  • toomanydoubts 4y ago
    I think you should be able to get pretty far with HTML5 <video> tag. You can also sprinkle something like playerjs or videojs to make it nicer.
    • Closi 4y ago
      Yes! Shocks me at how overly complicated people can decide that hosting a few videos is these days.
• ericras 4y ago
  Doing all the things YouTube does, like transcode videos, gets complicated quick. At the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, we created our own video hosting site, https://mediahub.unl.edu/ https://mediahub.unl.edu/ (https://github.com/unl/UNL_MediaHub https://github.com/unl/UNL_MediaHub) to self-host videos for when avoiding government or k-12 firewalls is desirable as well as integrating with rev.com for captioning. It's really unfortunate that higher education hasn't banded together more often to develop projects of mutual interest.
  • geekbird 4y ago
    It might be a nice business for someone to put together "eduTube" - a video platform for educational institutions. It would have a annual fee per organization based on size. It would: * allow archiving, or display with sunset on certain lectures * be available to university libraries, lecturers and student projects. * have less stringent content rules because educational * allow each institution could dictate what their rules were * allow institutions to determine who got what type of access I would do it, but I am kinda soft on the video transcoding skills. Maybe UNL could work on expanding the service, with a fee, to other universities.
    • therealdrag0 4y ago
      I’m not sure how much transcoding skills you need beyond ffmpeg; that’s what everyone uses.
  • orzig 4y ago
    Your point about coordination is a great one. In a perfectly rational world, even and economically self-interested one, there are many ways that the thousands of educational institutions around the country could pool their money to build something better than YouTube for their use case. But coordination is hard (I certainly don’t have any magic answers) so they each roll the dice with YouTube itself
• muglug 4y ago
  Used to work for Vimeo, I know a bit about this. Hosting videos is a non-trivial thing. Let's say you upload a video in 4K. Not everyone can watch in 4K, so it needs to be converted into other resolutions. That's transcoding. Then those other files need to be packaged so a player can intelligently upscale automatically depending on throttling — that requires a bunch of frontend and backend code to work correctly. Instead of building it themselves, Cornell could pay $$$ for a white-labelled third-party service, but they would be on the hook for a large recurring cost, and they won't get the benefit of YouTube's excellent discovery. We saw this phenomenon at Vimeo, which offers all the transcoding and throttling etc. Back in the day camera reviews were overwhelmingly hosted on Vimeo (mainly because it had a reputation for higher-quality video). We assumed that paying users would prefer their videos be watched in isolation from others' accounts — this seems obvious, but it means that the average user watches fewer videos per session, which decreases the overall view count. Over time YouTube mostly caught up on the video quality front, and camera reviewers were drawn to YouTube where there was a much greater chance of their video racking up a high view count than on Vimeo, simply because users watched more videos on YouTube. Stated cynically, YouTube doesn't respect users' attention spans as much, so it gets more viewers' time than other platforms. That means more people want to put their videos there for people to watch.
  • latchkey 4y ago
    I used to work for a very large porn company. We just transcoded and stored everything ourselves. Put a CDN in front of it and all good. Discovery is the issue here.
  • Closi 4y ago
    Why is the answer other platforms though? Just use handbrake to post three versions at three different resolutions and be done with it, or we all agree to move to some format that can easily support streaming with multiple bitrates.
    • codedokode 4y ago
      Youtube has millions of viewers that could stumble upon your videos. If you host them yourself, you won't get any views. Main value of Youtube is not their video hosting technology; it's the userbase.