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They would likely employ advertising, just as YouTube does. Are you saying it's not profitable to run a video hosting service? YouTube is evidence of that alre

They would likely employ advertising, just as YouTube does. Are you saying it's not profitable to run a video hosting service? YouTube is evidence of that already. A more straightforward way to accomplish this in areas where content size is large/expensive is to disallow coupling client creation with data hosting, and data vendors would license access to their data to client creators. Bundling becomes anti-competitive at a certain network size, because there becomes no meaningful way to create a competitor network. The essence of what makes capitalism effective is competition driving costs lower, and in many areas in tech we have very little competition due to large network effects. Keep in mind Capitalism != Free Market. A fully free market is a form of Capitalism that has no laws, and no impediment to monopoly formation. Competitive Capitalism with minimal laws to encourage competitive where large network effects or monopolies form is far more societally beneficial in the long run. Decoupling client/data has already been done many times in the past in analogous situations, e.g. when movie producers were not allowed to own the theaters where the movies were played, giving a much more equal footing to smaller content producers.

tpmoney 2y ago
They're asking who's going to cover YouTube's costs for providing their videos via API. Or is the expectation that if you use a 3rd party client you'll see youtube's ads to cover their costs, and then additional ads from the client?
- adam_arthur 2y ago
  Yes, there are many ways to do it, one of which I described above. You can disallow bundling a video client with the video data provider, thus forcing the data provider to monetize by charging the clients to use the data. The clients make money either via subscriptions or ads, and selling new video data back to the provider. e.g. Google would have to spin-off or re-org YouTube to split client/data and give same pricing terms to their client branch as to other third party clients This is a lighter touch/market based solution, which I prefer to being overly prescriptive.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  The government should move fast and break things in these sorts of cases. Especially in this case… video streaming isn’t very important, take action that might destroy their business model and see if we learn anything about how to regulate them in more meaningful markets.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  We already have 3rd-party YouTube clients: SmartTube, ReVanced, etc. They work quite well, in fact, much better than YouTube's own client. They don't need any money to cover their costs; they're FOSS. As for YouTube's costs, they don't show YouTube's ads, so basically Google is covering the cost there, though perhaps not willingly. But Google makes the YT API usable by these apps, and after all this time hasn't done too much to try to shut them down. We'll see how long that lasts, but there seem to be real technical limitations to how much Google can force ads, without resorting to recoding videos with ads in them which they surely really don't want to do.
  - Jensson 2y ago
    > without resorting to recoding videos with ads in them which they surely really don't want to do. There is an easy technical solution to this, just stream ads in the video feeds just like TV does. That downgrades the user experience compared to easier to separate ads, but if they can see you watch videos without the normal ads they can always do that. But the main reason they don't is probably that they can't target such ads very well and it is more expensive to inject in a stream rather than send separate videos, so not sure if it is even worth it for them.
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      >There is an easy technical solution to this, just stream ads in the video feeds just like TV does. You mean bake the ads into the stream? I don't think that's so easy to do in realtime. Even TV decades ago never did this AFAIK: they played the programming from one source, and then switched over to the commercial from another source (probably videotape) at the correct time. Anyway, if you're talking about permanently encoding the ad into the video, that really doesn't make sense. The ad probably won't be relevant to many of the viewers. YouTube is global, so if someone from France watches a cat video uploaded by an American and it has ads in English for Applebees restaurant, 1) they probably won't even understand it unless they happen to speak English and 2) there's no Applebees in France. The same thing applies if it's an ad for a restaurant that only exists in, say, California: viewers in New York aren't going to care, and the restaurant doesn't want to pay to advertise to viewers outside their area. Even worse, ads normally run for limited times, so YouTube would have to constantly re-encode videos to change the embedded ads.

tpmoney 2y ago

They're asking who's going to cover YouTube's costs for providing their videos via API. Or is the expectation that if you use a 3rd party client you'll see youtube's ads to cover their costs, and then additional ads from the client?

adam_arthur 2y ago
Yes, there are many ways to do it, one of which I described above. You can disallow bundling a video client with the video data provider, thus forcing the data provider to monetize by charging the clients to use the data. The clients make money either via subscriptions or ads, and selling new video data back to the provider. e.g. Google would have to spin-off or re-org YouTube to split client/data and give same pricing terms to their client branch as to other third party clients This is a lighter touch/market based solution, which I prefer to being overly prescriptive.
bee_rider 2y ago
The government should move fast and break things in these sorts of cases. Especially in this case… video streaming isn’t very important, take action that might destroy their business model and see if we learn anything about how to regulate them in more meaningful markets.
shiroiushi 2y ago
We already have 3rd-party YouTube clients: SmartTube, ReVanced, etc. They work quite well, in fact, much better than YouTube's own client. They don't need any money to cover their costs; they're FOSS. As for YouTube's costs, they don't show YouTube's ads, so basically Google is covering the cost there, though perhaps not willingly. But Google makes the YT API usable by these apps, and after all this time hasn't done too much to try to shut them down. We'll see how long that lasts, but there seem to be real technical limitations to how much Google can force ads, without resorting to recoding videos with ads in them which they surely really don't want to do.
- Jensson 2y ago
  > without resorting to recoding videos with ads in them which they surely really don't want to do. There is an easy technical solution to this, just stream ads in the video feeds just like TV does. That downgrades the user experience compared to easier to separate ads, but if they can see you watch videos without the normal ads they can always do that. But the main reason they don't is probably that they can't target such ads very well and it is more expensive to inject in a stream rather than send separate videos, so not sure if it is even worth it for them.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    >There is an easy technical solution to this, just stream ads in the video feeds just like TV does. You mean bake the ads into the stream? I don't think that's so easy to do in realtime. Even TV decades ago never did this AFAIK: they played the programming from one source, and then switched over to the commercial from another source (probably videotape) at the correct time. Anyway, if you're talking about permanently encoding the ad into the video, that really doesn't make sense. The ad probably won't be relevant to many of the viewers. YouTube is global, so if someone from France watches a cat video uploaded by an American and it has ads in English for Applebees restaurant, 1) they probably won't even understand it unless they happen to speak English and 2) there's no Applebees in France. The same thing applies if it's an ad for a restaurant that only exists in, say, California: viewers in New York aren't going to care, and the restaurant doesn't want to pay to advertise to viewers outside their area. Even worse, ads normally run for limited times, so YouTube would have to constantly re-encode videos to change the embedded ads.