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A bit off topic, but still: Why do we need YouTube and other "Video Hosting" platforms at all? Simply upload your video (webm, or MP4) to any static Webserver a

A bit off topic, but still: Why do we need YouTube and other "Video Hosting" platforms at all? Simply upload your video (webm, or MP4) to any static Webserver and embed in HTML5. Plays nicely and no adds. I don't get why some sites still embed their movies stored on YouTube.

ta12653421 1y ago
have you ever used the YT tools for managing videos and all the stuff? its super convenient, even non-techies will get it done within 15min, also you have lot of supportive functions / tools in der admin interface.
- bravesoul2 1y ago
  It is slightly more hassle as you'd have to download and upload...but Loom is great. Easy to edit your video.
gtsop 1y ago
Your use case is simplistic so it dismisses actual use cases. People make money on youtube through ads, you can't do that (as effectively) on your own server. This also ties with the analytics. Some organisations like the ready-made administration solution. Uploading files through ftp isn't for everyone. Youtube (and hosting platforms) has a nice ui to manage all the content, handles the user authentication etc. Bandwith. Backups. I aggree that for people who don't need all these, and are tech savvy, uploading an mp4 to a server is the way to go.
- bravesoul2 1y ago
  OP seems to be making 1200/m from cash subscriptions on floatplane. I get why people use YouTube though. But it is precarious too. You own jack shit.
- timewizard 1y ago
  > has a nice ui to manage all the content It has _a_ UI. > uploading an mp4 to a server is the way to go. Hotlinking. Connection limit tuning. DDoS. People don't want the hassle.
- InternetUser 1y ago
  I think a bigger reason is all of those is the brand trust that YouTube has. If I, as an independent director, make a music video, or a 10-minute tutorial video, or a short cinematic film, and want it to be seen by tens of thousands of people this month, YouTube is where I'm posting it. If you can persuade me that there's a video URL that thousands and even millions of random strangers would be even more likely to click on than one that starts with YouTube.com, I'd be very grateful to know it. Even Vimeo is known to far fewer Gen Z viewers than it has been to Millennials - https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=vimeo&hl=en-US https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=v...
gmueckl 1y ago
There is more to serving videos well than meets the eye. Not all browsers support all codecs. Not all devices have sufficient bandwidth to stream the highest quality encoding or the available bandwidth isn't constant. Does the server have enough bandwidth? How much does the hosting service charge for outgoing traffic? While you can put an mp4 file on a webserver and call it a day, it'll most likely be a pretty bad experience for the users.
- account42 1y ago
  Not a bad experience at all compared to ads.
  - neogodless 1y ago
    You may have missed the point of the parent comment. Without defining the experience you can call it better or worse than any random thing! But if the video stops every 0.1 seconds to buffer for two hours, is that better than stopping very 25 minutes for a 30 second ad? If the video must be 24 x 32 pixels for the bandwidth to be low enough for your server restrictions, is that worse than the above scenario but a 4k 60fps video? Where do you draw the line for experience?
    - timeon 1y ago
      I think no video is better than one that starts with ad. At least for long term mental health.
      - Capricorn2481 1y ago
        > I think no video is better than one that starts with ad. At least for long term mental health That's vague. I think most people would disagree, and the commenter is right that people put up with ads for a certain degree of quality. We used to have 4 minute ad breaks on TV. The only reason people moved to streaming is because the quality was the same. I can't imagine ads are doing much more damage to our mental health than the content we consume in the first place. Likely less.
yonatan8070 1y ago
As others said, creators are often relying on AdSense from YouTube, and even if they did run ads on their own website, how would it be discovered? Let's say a creator decided to move to some non-YouTube platform that pays exactly the same as YouTube, via ads and premium subscriptions, whatever that platform is, it will have nowhere near the size of the audience that YouTube has, meaning the creator will be losing out on revenue. This discourages creators from moving away from YouTube, meaning viewers will stay on YouTube See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
- naikrovek 1y ago
  The problem here is that people make videos for money. If you make videos for money you are highly interested in following googles rules, no matter how insane they get. Maybe don’t make a career out of videos? If everyone just stopped doing that, Google would have a lot less muscle when telling people what they could do in their videos. Life pro tip: never do things solely for money. People seem to get mad when I say that but they also seem to misunderstand what I mean when I say “solely for money”. If you have a job that pays the bills, don’t make YouTube videos solely because you will have more money. Doing so will put you in Googles mercy, and you will be scared to death to do anything that removes that income. Instead, make videos to help your career, or simply for fun, and don’t monetize them. Google can’t threaten your income if you don’t get income from them.
- Xelbair 1y ago
  From what i've heard from creators youtube ads are such a small fraction of revenue that they don't count it - maybe horrible clickbait content mills depend on it but world would be better off without them. Mostly it comes from patreon or equivalent, sponsorship deals and merch sales. Youtube exists only because discoverability, and ads profit goes mostly to YT itself.
InternetUser 1y ago
What's an example or two of what one of those static Webserver's URLs would look like? I'd like to see one that you believe would get as many random people to click on it as would click on it if were a YouTube link. In my own experience, sharing videos on Reddit, X, and via text message that are not from YouTube often get comments and questions of suspicion and distrust about the site it's posted from, and sometimes, even people even posting a YouTube copy of the same video. Some of those sites have been Odysee, DailyMotion, and Ok.ru. YouTube is a name that billions of people worldwide trust, and it has been the 2nd most visited online property in the U.S. and worldwide for many years now.
SparksJoy981 1y ago
* it serves multiple sizes for faster/slower connections * it serves it with correct codecs, whatever the original input * from local servers that are close to the user, so it's faster * it doesn't kill your bills when the video becomes moderately popular * discussions built-in * virality built-in * it won't go down when you forget to pay your server * you don't need to deal with hosting software updates You can solve some of that with CDNs, some of them even do some kind of video players that do all the ffmpeg stuff for you, but then you have a third party in the mix again.
- ThatPlayer 1y ago
  > it doesn't kill your bills when the video becomes moderately popular Even a paid service, Vimeo, made news a few years ago because they would bill video uploaders for "moderately popular" videos: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30686704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30686704
jeroenhd 1y ago
Because bandwidth is expensive and at a certain point so is storage. Also because ISPs are terrible companies that will sabotage your attempt to stream video for no reason other than spite. In theory you can just point a browser at a video and it'll play. The problem is, for a significant chunk of the world, that video will only play halfway through, or play barely if at all, or it'll take an hour to load even though you have an excellent connection. Then, there's the discoverability problem. If you want to create a channel, you want people to know your channel exists. So do millions of others. Youtube and similar platforms use tag/content correlation to suggest videos (and then some AI bullshit to do the same but worse) to naturally grow your audience over time. The web archive copy of his LibreELEC video is 860MiB in size. His recent RPi video got 156k views over 6 days. Transferring the 1073 TBit of video over those 6 days in the most optimal scenario would require a constant stream of 2070mbps. At the VPS provider I find most reliable, that'll cost him €124 just for the network traffic for the first six days. That's not taking into account the burst of tens of thousands of viewers just after releasing a video, or the fact that Jeff has tons of other videos on his channel. Of course there are optimizations. You could transcode the video to even lower bitrates to save bandwidth, you could set up different quality profiles and write/buy a complex video player library to handle those automatically. Peertube tries to solve this problem by leveraging P2P video, but not everyone is a fan of exposing their IP address to every other viewer (bot, human, data collection tool) when they play a video. And then you need to kick out all the scrapers and download bots wasting your bandwidth for their personal gain. Plus, you can't monetize the videos. Great for people consuming content already paid for, like government instruction videos or corporate productions, but terrible for people who use Youtube to fund the video creation process itself. Even Jeff Geerling, someone with a sizeable audience of relatively wealthy audience (thanks, tech industry!), says he cannot maintain his channel through Patreon alone: > I was never able to sustain my open source work based on patronage, and content production is the same—just more expensive to maintain to any standard (each video takes between 10-300 hours to produce, and I have a family to feed, and US health insurance companies to fund). Youtube happened for a good reason and it can't happen again without wasting billions on making the servers, software, bandwidth, and content in general free for years before it can reach critical mass. Even for hobbyists, offsetting the network egress fees alone would be a challenge without monetization. Linus Tech Tips is trying to spread their eggs across more baskets by setting up Floatplane, and there's a reason Floatplane is far from free. Sticking a webm file on a web server somewhere is a solution for videos that get a couple hundred views, but it quickly becomes unsustainable.
noirscape 1y ago
At its simplest; the economics of hosting video quickly become unsustainable. A well formatted blog takes maybe 1MB at most per request (a really well made blog can lower that quicker). 20 minutes of 1080p video is ~500mb according to most YouTube downloading tools. Hetzner offers you 20TB of free internet traffic per month for every VPS you buy. That one blog can be send up to 20000000 (that's 20 million!) times to people every month before you'd have to start looking for CDNs or other fancy solutions. By contrast, that 20 minute video runs out of bandwidth after 40000 (40 thousand) times before you hit the same scenario. (These are hypotheticals, of course you'd incur more due to traffic overhead and the realistic answer that you'll have more than one page/file on your site.) It's essentially a scale problem; bandwidth is really expensive if you don't outright own (and have the need to use) a data center or colocate. (And even then it's still expensive, it just goes from completely unreasonable to "maybe a sustainable business".) Alternatively, CDN solutions also get very expensive very quickly at the amount of traffic that digital video tends to consume (which wouldn't be selfhosting it anymore, but is worth a mention). And that's without going into the discovery issues or the fact that browsers accept much fewer codecs than you'd expect for video playback (which can further bloat up storage size as you might have to use less efficient solutions.)
phyzix5761 1y ago
The ads is the reason why content creators post their videos on YouTube. The want to be, and deserve to be, compensated. His audience would shrink immediately if he were to self host his videos and his source of income would disappear overnight; leading to him doing something other than content creation to provide for his family.
- geerlingguy 1y ago
  For me, it's a little bit that, but probably just as much the bandwidth costs. I used to host some video content, but even if one video got 1/10th the views it gets on YouTube, it would be many TB of bandwidth, and that gets quite expensive. The solution is to upload in like 360p low quality, but then any screen recordings are a muddy mess and there's no point.
voidUpdate 1y ago
No discoverability. Youtube will recommend videos from its vast library and you can search them, but if I host all my content on voidupdate.co.uk, nobody will ever find it unless they look at my HN profile or something
- superkuh 1y ago
  I share the vast majority of my uploaded videos with friends and peers on IRC by directly giving them the link, so no problem. Video hosting should not be tied to profit motives. If that's your thing, if your job is making videos to sell things or display ads, then yes, you're gonna need Alphabet's Google's Youtube or some similar megacorp to handle money transfers and for network effect. If you're like 99% of the rest of us on Earth then a static .mp4 file with -movflags +faststart is great and satisfies all needs.
superkuh 1y ago
You don't even need HTML. Encoded as an mp4 with ffmpeg -movflags +faststart and you now have a mp4 that almost all browsers can use the seek bar within without any sort of javascript or HTML. Streaming without all the complexity of 'streaming'. Just a simple static .mp4 file on a webserver.
flyinghamster 1y ago
Unfortunately, data transfer requirements for video are through the roof compared even to audio, let alone text. Self-hosting is great if your audience is in the tens, but if your video goes viral, you'll get slammed with terabytes of egress.

ta12653421 1y ago

have you ever used the YT tools for managing videos and all the stuff? its super convenient, even non-techies will get it done within 15min, also you have lot of supportive functions / tools in der admin interface.

bravesoul2 1y ago
It is slightly more hassle as you'd have to download and upload...but Loom is great. Easy to edit your video.

gtsop 1y ago

Your use case is simplistic so it dismisses actual use cases. People make money on youtube through ads, you can't do that (as effectively) on your own server. This also ties with the analytics. Some organisations like the ready-made administration solution. Uploading files through ftp isn't for everyone. Youtube (and hosting platforms) has a nice ui to manage all the content, handles the user authentication etc. Bandwith. Backups. I aggree that for people who don't need all these, and are tech savvy, uploading an mp4 to a server is the way to go.

bravesoul2 1y ago
OP seems to be making 1200/m from cash subscriptions on floatplane. I get why people use YouTube though. But it is precarious too. You own jack shit.
timewizard 1y ago
> has a nice ui to manage all the content It has _a_ UI. > uploading an mp4 to a server is the way to go. Hotlinking. Connection limit tuning. DDoS. People don't want the hassle.
InternetUser 1y ago
I think a bigger reason is all of those is the brand trust that YouTube has. If I, as an independent director, make a music video, or a 10-minute tutorial video, or a short cinematic film, and want it to be seen by tens of thousands of people this month, YouTube is where I'm posting it. If you can persuade me that there's a video URL that thousands and even millions of random strangers would be even more likely to click on than one that starts with YouTube.com, I'd be very grateful to know it. Even Vimeo is known to far fewer Gen Z viewers than it has been to Millennials - https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=vimeo&hl=en-US https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=v...

gmueckl 1y ago

There is more to serving videos well than meets the eye. Not all browsers support all codecs. Not all devices have sufficient bandwidth to stream the highest quality encoding or the available bandwidth isn't constant. Does the server have enough bandwidth? How much does the hosting service charge for outgoing traffic? While you can put an mp4 file on a webserver and call it a day, it'll most likely be a pretty bad experience for the users.

account42 1y ago
Not a bad experience at all compared to ads.
- neogodless 1y ago
  You may have missed the point of the parent comment. Without defining the experience you can call it better or worse than any random thing! But if the video stops every 0.1 seconds to buffer for two hours, is that better than stopping very 25 minutes for a 30 second ad? If the video must be 24 x 32 pixels for the bandwidth to be low enough for your server restrictions, is that worse than the above scenario but a 4k 60fps video? Where do you draw the line for experience?
  - timeon 1y ago
    I think no video is better than one that starts with ad. At least for long term mental health.
    - Capricorn2481 1y ago
      > I think no video is better than one that starts with ad. At least for long term mental health That's vague. I think most people would disagree, and the commenter is right that people put up with ads for a certain degree of quality. We used to have 4 minute ad breaks on TV. The only reason people moved to streaming is because the quality was the same. I can't imagine ads are doing much more damage to our mental health than the content we consume in the first place. Likely less.

yonatan8070 1y ago

As others said, creators are often relying on AdSense from YouTube, and even if they did run ads on their own website, how would it be discovered? Let's say a creator decided to move to some non-YouTube platform that pays exactly the same as YouTube, via ads and premium subscriptions, whatever that platform is, it will have nowhere near the size of the audience that YouTube has, meaning the creator will be losing out on revenue. This discourages creators from moving away from YouTube, meaning viewers will stay on YouTube See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

naikrovek 1y ago
The problem here is that people make videos for money. If you make videos for money you are highly interested in following googles rules, no matter how insane they get. Maybe don’t make a career out of videos? If everyone just stopped doing that, Google would have a lot less muscle when telling people what they could do in their videos. Life pro tip: never do things solely for money. People seem to get mad when I say that but they also seem to misunderstand what I mean when I say “solely for money”. If you have a job that pays the bills, don’t make YouTube videos solely because you will have more money. Doing so will put you in Googles mercy, and you will be scared to death to do anything that removes that income. Instead, make videos to help your career, or simply for fun, and don’t monetize them. Google can’t threaten your income if you don’t get income from them.
Xelbair 1y ago
From what i've heard from creators youtube ads are such a small fraction of revenue that they don't count it - maybe horrible clickbait content mills depend on it but world would be better off without them. Mostly it comes from patreon or equivalent, sponsorship deals and merch sales. Youtube exists only because discoverability, and ads profit goes mostly to YT itself.

InternetUser 1y ago

What's an example or two of what one of those static Webserver's URLs would look like? I'd like to see one that you believe would get as many random people to click on it as would click on it if were a YouTube link. In my own experience, sharing videos on Reddit, X, and via text message that are not from YouTube often get comments and questions of suspicion and distrust about the site it's posted from, and sometimes, even people even posting a YouTube copy of the same video. Some of those sites have been Odysee, DailyMotion, and Ok.ru. YouTube is a name that billions of people worldwide trust, and it has been the 2nd most visited online property in the U.S. and worldwide for many years now.

SparksJoy981 1y ago

* it serves multiple sizes for faster/slower connections * it serves it with correct codecs, whatever the original input * from local servers that are close to the user, so it's faster * it doesn't kill your bills when the video becomes moderately popular * discussions built-in * virality built-in * it won't go down when you forget to pay your server * you don't need to deal with hosting software updates You can solve some of that with CDNs, some of them even do some kind of video players that do all the ffmpeg stuff for you, but then you have a third party in the mix again.

ThatPlayer 1y ago
> it doesn't kill your bills when the video becomes moderately popular Even a paid service, Vimeo, made news a few years ago because they would bill video uploaders for "moderately popular" videos: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30686704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30686704

jeroenhd 1y ago

Because bandwidth is expensive and at a certain point so is storage. Also because ISPs are terrible companies that will sabotage your attempt to stream video for no reason other than spite. In theory you can just point a browser at a video and it'll play. The problem is, for a significant chunk of the world, that video will only play halfway through, or play barely if at all, or it'll take an hour to load even though you have an excellent connection. Then, there's the discoverability problem. If you want to create a channel, you want people to know your channel exists. So do millions of others. Youtube and similar platforms use tag/content correlation to suggest videos (and then some AI bullshit to do the same but worse) to naturally grow your audience over time. The web archive copy of his LibreELEC video is 860MiB in size. His recent RPi video got 156k views over 6 days. Transferring the 1073 TBit of video over those 6 days in the most optimal scenario would require a constant stream of 2070mbps. At the VPS provider I find most reliable, that'll cost him €124 just for the network traffic for the first six days. That's not taking into account the burst of tens of thousands of viewers just after releasing a video, or the fact that Jeff has tons of other videos on his channel. Of course there are optimizations. You could transcode the video to even lower bitrates to save bandwidth, you could set up different quality profiles and write/buy a complex video player library to handle those automatically. Peertube tries to solve this problem by leveraging P2P video, but not everyone is a fan of exposing their IP address to every other viewer (bot, human, data collection tool) when they play a video. And then you need to kick out all the scrapers and download bots wasting your bandwidth for their personal gain. Plus, you can't monetize the videos. Great for people consuming content already paid for, like government instruction videos or corporate productions, but terrible for people who use Youtube to fund the video creation process itself. Even Jeff Geerling, someone with a sizeable audience of relatively wealthy audience (thanks, tech industry!), says he cannot maintain his channel through Patreon alone: > I was never able to sustain my open source work based on patronage, and content production is the same—just more expensive to maintain to any standard (each video takes between 10-300 hours to produce, and I have a family to feed, and US health insurance companies to fund). Youtube happened for a good reason and it can't happen again without wasting billions on making the servers, software, bandwidth, and content in general free for years before it can reach critical mass. Even for hobbyists, offsetting the network egress fees alone would be a challenge without monetization. Linus Tech Tips is trying to spread their eggs across more baskets by setting up Floatplane, and there's a reason Floatplane is far from free. Sticking a webm file on a web server somewhere is a solution for videos that get a couple hundred views, but it quickly becomes unsustainable.

noirscape 1y ago

At its simplest; the economics of hosting video quickly become unsustainable. A well formatted blog takes maybe 1MB at most per request (a really well made blog can lower that quicker). 20 minutes of 1080p video is ~500mb according to most YouTube downloading tools. Hetzner offers you 20TB of free internet traffic per month for every VPS you buy. That one blog can be send up to 20000000 (that's 20 million!) times to people every month before you'd have to start looking for CDNs or other fancy solutions. By contrast, that 20 minute video runs out of bandwidth after 40000 (40 thousand) times before you hit the same scenario. (These are hypotheticals, of course you'd incur more due to traffic overhead and the realistic answer that you'll have more than one page/file on your site.) It's essentially a scale problem; bandwidth is really expensive if you don't outright own (and have the need to use) a data center or colocate. (And even then it's still expensive, it just goes from completely unreasonable to "maybe a sustainable business".) Alternatively, CDN solutions also get very expensive very quickly at the amount of traffic that digital video tends to consume (which wouldn't be selfhosting it anymore, but is worth a mention). And that's without going into the discovery issues or the fact that browsers accept much fewer codecs than you'd expect for video playback (which can further bloat up storage size as you might have to use less efficient solutions.)

phyzix5761 1y ago

The ads is the reason why content creators post their videos on YouTube. The want to be, and deserve to be, compensated. His audience would shrink immediately if he were to self host his videos and his source of income would disappear overnight; leading to him doing something other than content creation to provide for his family.

geerlingguy 1y ago
For me, it's a little bit that, but probably just as much the bandwidth costs. I used to host some video content, but even if one video got 1/10th the views it gets on YouTube, it would be many TB of bandwidth, and that gets quite expensive. The solution is to upload in like 360p low quality, but then any screen recordings are a muddy mess and there's no point.

voidUpdate 1y ago

No discoverability. Youtube will recommend videos from its vast library and you can search them, but if I host all my content on voidupdate.co.uk, nobody will ever find it unless they look at my HN profile or something

superkuh 1y ago
I share the vast majority of my uploaded videos with friends and peers on IRC by directly giving them the link, so no problem. Video hosting should not be tied to profit motives. If that's your thing, if your job is making videos to sell things or display ads, then yes, you're gonna need Alphabet's Google's Youtube or some similar megacorp to handle money transfers and for network effect. If you're like 99% of the rest of us on Earth then a static .mp4 file with -movflags +faststart is great and satisfies all needs.

superkuh 1y ago

You don't even need HTML. Encoded as an mp4 with ffmpeg -movflags +faststart and you now have a mp4 that almost all browsers can use the seek bar within without any sort of javascript or HTML. Streaming without all the complexity of 'streaming'. Just a simple static .mp4 file on a webserver.

flyinghamster 1y ago

Unfortunately, data transfer requirements for video are through the roof compared even to audio, let alone text. Self-hosting is great if your audience is in the tens, but if your video goes viral, you'll get slammed with terabytes of egress.