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Ask HN: If YouTube was founded in 2012 instead of 2005, how would it differ?
YouTube has always been notorious as a business for how expensive it was to run the service. Streaming video is extremely bandwidth intensive. That, along with uploading and huge traffic, means that YouTube's costs have always been high, which is most likely something that factored into the decision to sell to Google.<p>I assume these issues were even worse/more expensive in 2005 when YT was founded. My question is this:<p>In 2012, there many more services available to developers such as Amazon's S3, EC2, Heroku and Akamai. In an alternate universe where YouTube was founded in 2012, can you give me a prediction of how YouTube as a business would differ?
- stevewilhelm 14y agoIt would be much more mobile centric; think a video Instagram.
- zoltar92 14y agoI agree
- rachelbythebay 14y agoWere their costs that high? You might want to see what sort of deal they had with ServerBeach back in the day. Considering that SB didn't even have bandwidth monitoring, never mind billing, at some point, how bad could it have been? If they were doing it today, there's no way they'd ever find an unmetered pipe to the outside world. People know that video over the web is feasible now, and that means bandwidth is treated differently.
- hoop 14y agoTheir comments would be full of kindness and mutual respect.
- kirang1989 14y agoMore widespread use of HTML 5.