10 ms·

I think media playback is only part of the core functionality. The other key piece is discoverability, and on that front, YouTube is far, far better than a nati

by adamc 11y ago

I think media playback is only part of the core functionality. The other key piece is discoverability, and on that front, YouTube is far, far better than a native media player. It also benefits hugely from urls, which allow users to share what they've found. So, arguably, YouTube's success is more about what the web does well than about it's media playback -- it just has to be "good enough" on that front.

the8472 11y ago
> It also benefits hugely from urls, which allow users to share what they've found. how about http://some.storage.service.tld/path/to/video.mkv http://some.storage.service.tld/path/to/video.mkv or even rtmp://some.streaming.service.tld/path/to/stream ? For sharing that would be sufficient. Of course there are some business realities (ads, copyright, paying for storage) that make direct, free access to videos unlikely. But that's basically arguing that the web is a superior platform for monetizing things, not necessarily a superior platform as far as user-experience goes. > The other key piece is discoverability, and on that front, YouTube is far, far better I'll give you that one. But then again there are dedicated media-discovery-sites (imdb, last.fm) that do not have playback as their core functionality, even though they may offer some playback.
- msl09 11y ago
  I would like to complement that native youtube(the one used on mobile) is far better at playback while keeping nearly every other advantage that it has on the web.
  - monsterix 11y ago
    > that native youtube(the one used on mobile) is far better at playback. No, it is not. Playback would get stuck, sound would go away for no rhyme or reason and what not. Better experience? - no - quite the opposite. I got rid [1] of the native nuisance completely. And the experience of search, comment and history on native was simply terrible. Much lesser control on ad-blocking too, and really the ads on YT are sometimes seriously irritating. [1] Evidence: https://twitter.com/marvindanig/status/598701509963083777 https://twitter.com/marvindanig/status/598701509963083777
    - c22 11y ago
      I haven't tried YouTube on IOS but the native YouTube app for android is better than watching YouTube videos in mobile Chrome for me. Evidence: ^
    - briandear 11y ago
      If you block the ads, how does the site make money to support your viewing habits?
      - mattLummus 11y ago
        That is irrelevant. I prefer to not have ads and Google is generally kind of to comply and suggest developers respect ad-blockers as well, even though the vast majority of Google's revenue comes from ads. To suggest going native to provide revenue over UX only benefits the provider, not the user.
      - JetSpiegel 11y ago
        Are you seriously arguing that Google is not making enough money?
        mattLummus 11y ago
        Not at all, but it is still their main source of revenue.
- wpietri 11y ago
  That's certainly not what I want to share. One of the things that good video sites provide is context. E.g.: Who made this? What else have they done? How can I find them? Has this been widely seen? What do people say about it? Raw streaming urls don't get me any of that. URLs aren't just pointers to bytestreams. From a user sharing perspective, they're humans pointing to a unique thing. And what they're pointing to is often much more complex than a single raw file.
  - the8472 11y ago
    > What do people say about it? you want to share youtube comments with people? they are a significant value-add to you?
    - snowwrestler 11y ago
      Youtube comments are great for finding out the name of songs in the background of the video.
      - towelguy 11y ago
        And all of them are Darude's Sandstorm.
        15155 11y ago
        You mean 009 Sound System.
      - ethbro 11y ago
        > Youtube comments are great for finding out the name of songs in the background of the video. And here I'd concluded the comments section existed to allow pre-teens to practice their ability to make racist remarks.
        x0x0 11y ago
        and post-teens
- jamespo 11y ago
  The business realities make direct, free, downloadable videos impossible rather than unlikely at scale.
  - thatcat 11y ago
    >business realities make direct, free, downloadable videos impossible at scale And yet it's existed for years using p2p/torrents. So they're more like business fictions
    - oldmanjay 11y ago
      Do you feel you made a point by listing services that exist only by breaking the law to exist as somehow related to business reality? Making your money by trampling the rights of others isn't exactly sustainable. The only way you have a point is to be rampantly intellectually dishonest, or ignorant of reality. Neither option is great, so charitably, it's best to assume you know this stuff and you're just trolling. Also not great. Do you have a 4th option?
      - cousin_it 11y ago
        I think grandparent just wished to say that "direct, free, downloadable videos" are technologically possible at large scale via p2p. Mentioning copyright is a bit off topic. It's possible to create a paid p2p service for video, and have tons of viewers without spending millions on infrastructure. Hence the bit about "business fictions".
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
      - drostie 11y ago
        The violation of IP is a similar problem for torrents and YouTube alike. The "4th option" is that you've got the causality completely backwards in your head: it just happens to be the case that the cultures where distributed tooling became important were the ones where it was necessary to promote an "all information is free" mindset, not that it's necessarily a part of distributed tooling that you take that mindset. If we start with a centralized metadata server/peer tracker, a set of "base seeds" to keep videos alive, and a commenting system, we can still revoke access to individual videos (our app will simply not support peer discovery except through our tracker, we take down the seeds, comments, and tracker entry on a revocation) while distributing bandwidth for the viral videos that need it. The point is germane.
- baddox 11y ago
  > how about http://some.storage.service.tld/path/to/video.mkv http://some.storage.service.tld/path/to/video.mkv or even rtmp://some.streaming.service.tld/path/to/stream ? Well, if I click on the first link, a video doesn't play (that would be the case even if the link were to an actual MKV video). The second URL isn't even a hyperlink on news.ycombinator.com. But if I click on a valid YouTube link, a video plays nearly immediately.
shwetank 11y ago
Also the fact that you can embed youtube videos in other web pages.
- yellowapple 11y ago
  If YouTube provided direct links to video files, you could embed YouTube videos in other web pages just as easily thanks to HTML5.
- some1else 11y ago
  Using flash to deliver video on web was a chore and nobody was doing it right.
romaniv 11y ago
Imagine YouTube that hosts everything it hosts now, but when you click "play", opens your video player of choice and streams the video.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- piyush_soni 11y ago
  People had imagined and implemented that long back. They were called plugins. Thank god, media player plugins are dead.
  - the8472 11y ago
    the point is allowing independent applications to talk to each other (IPC) not to tightly integrate one application into another, that's a big difference.
  - ams6110 11y ago
    I don't recall plugins ever offering much choice. "Please install Flash to view this content" is what I remember. If I could stream directly to VLC or a player of my choice I'd be happy with that.
    - pjmlp 11y ago
      That is how Real Player, Windows Media Player and many others work, or used to work back in the early 2000's.
    - yellowapple 11y ago
      Some (most?) browsers still do this when presented with a media file. Firefox in particular will use VLC on my machine for that purpose (or, if it's not installed, some HTML5 barebones media player, or some other media player that can be embedded if one is installed).
    - wmil 11y ago
      Before flash could play video, links that open in the media player of your choice were very common. It was a nightmare. Each media player would try to hijack every link type it knew about each time it ran. But there wasn't full compatibility. So you'd click a link, RealPlayer would try to open it, and the player would crash. The major players actively fought open standards, because they each had dreams of controlling a DRM & patent gated empire. Flash brought some sanity to web video. Although initially it had performance issues (it had issues with hardware overlays on some video hardware).
ori_b 11y ago
> It also benefits hugely from urls What about URLs mean that a native player can't use them?
hrktb 11y ago
I would compare and contrast the experience you are describing with a podcast player like pocketcast. Synchronized play state and playlists on all the devices. Offline handling of the media files with streaming as an option. Feed subscription but also podcast repository and ranking/trending screens. All media files are by definition in independant feeds, and sharing a file URL is supported. It brings a hugely better experience than youtube pr any online video service I've seen. I actually switched to my podcast player all the youtube channels that also have a separate feed.
- rictic 11y ago
  Huh, I suspect we have very different consumption habits. I could predict ahead of time perhaps 5% of the youtube videos that I end up watching.
  - hrktb 11y ago
    I think youtube is on your side, as it's heavily biased toward random one offs video watching. I'm always baffled by the suggestions when watching videos from some common series. There would be mostly accurate suggestions, and consistently two or three videos completely unrelated taken from my viewing history. For instance there would be 'Howto repair your dishwasher' in the middle of all the videos of a math channel. I tend to massively subscribe to channels and watch in batches, so I have (and want to have) a very good idea of what's coming next in my queue.
zokier 11y ago
But having URLs or discovery or social features is orthogonal to using web tech, especially in the front end. Eg. Spotify had all of those in a tight little native client, before they rewrote it with web stack with controversial results.
tw04 11y ago
So why shouldn't youtube just be an index of videos that then launch in a native local application? The only reason youtube is better on that front is because google.

by adamc 11y ago

the8472 11y ago

> It also benefits hugely from urls, which allow users to share what they've found. how about http://some.storage.service.tld/path/to/video.mkv http://some.storage.service.tld/path/to/video.mkv or even rtmp://some.streaming.service.tld/path/to/stream ? For sharing that would be sufficient. Of course there are some business realities (ads, copyright, paying for storage) that make direct, free access to videos unlikely. But that's basically arguing that the web is a superior platform for monetizing things, not necessarily a superior platform as far as user-experience goes. > The other key piece is discoverability, and on that front, YouTube is far, far better I'll give you that one. But then again there are dedicated media-discovery-sites (imdb, last.fm) that do not have playback as their core functionality, even though they may offer some playback.

msl09 11y ago
I would like to complement that native youtube(the one used on mobile) is far better at playback while keeping nearly every other advantage that it has on the web.
- monsterix 11y ago
  > that native youtube(the one used on mobile) is far better at playback. No, it is not. Playback would get stuck, sound would go away for no rhyme or reason and what not. Better experience? - no - quite the opposite. I got rid [1] of the native nuisance completely. And the experience of search, comment and history on native was simply terrible. Much lesser control on ad-blocking too, and really the ads on YT are sometimes seriously irritating. [1] Evidence: https://twitter.com/marvindanig/status/598701509963083777 https://twitter.com/marvindanig/status/598701509963083777
  - c22 11y ago
    I haven't tried YouTube on IOS but the native YouTube app for android is better than watching YouTube videos in mobile Chrome for me. Evidence: ^
  - briandear 11y ago
    If you block the ads, how does the site make money to support your viewing habits?
    - mattLummus 11y ago
      That is irrelevant. I prefer to not have ads and Google is generally kind of to comply and suggest developers respect ad-blockers as well, even though the vast majority of Google's revenue comes from ads. To suggest going native to provide revenue over UX only benefits the provider, not the user.
    - JetSpiegel 11y ago
      Are you seriously arguing that Google is not making enough money?
      - mattLummus 11y ago
        Not at all, but it is still their main source of revenue.
wpietri 11y ago
That's certainly not what I want to share. One of the things that good video sites provide is context. E.g.: Who made this? What else have they done? How can I find them? Has this been widely seen? What do people say about it? Raw streaming urls don't get me any of that. URLs aren't just pointers to bytestreams. From a user sharing perspective, they're humans pointing to a unique thing. And what they're pointing to is often much more complex than a single raw file.
- the8472 11y ago
  > What do people say about it? you want to share youtube comments with people? they are a significant value-add to you?
  - snowwrestler 11y ago
    Youtube comments are great for finding out the name of songs in the background of the video.
    - towelguy 11y ago
      And all of them are Darude's Sandstorm.
      - 15155 11y ago
        You mean 009 Sound System.
    - ethbro 11y ago
      > Youtube comments are great for finding out the name of songs in the background of the video. And here I'd concluded the comments section existed to allow pre-teens to practice their ability to make racist remarks.
      - x0x0 11y ago
        and post-teens
jamespo 11y ago
The business realities make direct, free, downloadable videos impossible rather than unlikely at scale.
- thatcat 11y ago
  >business realities make direct, free, downloadable videos impossible at scale And yet it's existed for years using p2p/torrents. So they're more like business fictions
  - oldmanjay 11y ago
    Do you feel you made a point by listing services that exist only by breaking the law to exist as somehow related to business reality? Making your money by trampling the rights of others isn't exactly sustainable. The only way you have a point is to be rampantly intellectually dishonest, or ignorant of reality. Neither option is great, so charitably, it's best to assume you know this stuff and you're just trolling. Also not great. Do you have a 4th option?
    - cousin_it 11y ago
      I think grandparent just wished to say that "direct, free, downloadable videos" are technologically possible at large scale via p2p. Mentioning copyright is a bit off topic. It's possible to create a paid p2p service for video, and have tons of viewers without spending millions on infrastructure. Hence the bit about "business fictions".
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - drostie 11y ago
      The violation of IP is a similar problem for torrents and YouTube alike. The "4th option" is that you've got the causality completely backwards in your head: it just happens to be the case that the cultures where distributed tooling became important were the ones where it was necessary to promote an "all information is free" mindset, not that it's necessarily a part of distributed tooling that you take that mindset. If we start with a centralized metadata server/peer tracker, a set of "base seeds" to keep videos alive, and a commenting system, we can still revoke access to individual videos (our app will simply not support peer discovery except through our tracker, we take down the seeds, comments, and tracker entry on a revocation) while distributing bandwidth for the viral videos that need it. The point is germane.
baddox 11y ago
> how about http://some.storage.service.tld/path/to/video.mkv http://some.storage.service.tld/path/to/video.mkv or even rtmp://some.streaming.service.tld/path/to/stream ? Well, if I click on the first link, a video doesn't play (that would be the case even if the link were to an actual MKV video). The second URL isn't even a hyperlink on news.ycombinator.com. But if I click on a valid YouTube link, a video plays nearly immediately.

shwetank 11y ago

Also the fact that you can embed youtube videos in other web pages.

yellowapple 11y ago
If YouTube provided direct links to video files, you could embed YouTube videos in other web pages just as easily thanks to HTML5.
some1else 11y ago
Using flash to deliver video on web was a chore and nobody was doing it right.

romaniv 11y ago

Imagine YouTube that hosts everything it hosts now, but when you click "play", opens your video player of choice and streams the video.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
piyush_soni 11y ago
People had imagined and implemented that long back. They were called plugins. Thank god, media player plugins are dead.
- the8472 11y ago
  the point is allowing independent applications to talk to each other (IPC) not to tightly integrate one application into another, that's a big difference.
- ams6110 11y ago
  I don't recall plugins ever offering much choice. "Please install Flash to view this content" is what I remember. If I could stream directly to VLC or a player of my choice I'd be happy with that.
  - pjmlp 11y ago
    That is how Real Player, Windows Media Player and many others work, or used to work back in the early 2000's.
  - yellowapple 11y ago
    Some (most?) browsers still do this when presented with a media file. Firefox in particular will use VLC on my machine for that purpose (or, if it's not installed, some HTML5 barebones media player, or some other media player that can be embedded if one is installed).
  - wmil 11y ago
    Before flash could play video, links that open in the media player of your choice were very common. It was a nightmare. Each media player would try to hijack every link type it knew about each time it ran. But there wasn't full compatibility. So you'd click a link, RealPlayer would try to open it, and the player would crash. The major players actively fought open standards, because they each had dreams of controlling a DRM & patent gated empire. Flash brought some sanity to web video. Although initially it had performance issues (it had issues with hardware overlays on some video hardware).

ori_b 11y ago

> It also benefits hugely from urls What about URLs mean that a native player can't use them?

hrktb 11y ago

I would compare and contrast the experience you are describing with a podcast player like pocketcast. Synchronized play state and playlists on all the devices. Offline handling of the media files with streaming as an option. Feed subscription but also podcast repository and ranking/trending screens. All media files are by definition in independant feeds, and sharing a file URL is supported. It brings a hugely better experience than youtube pr any online video service I've seen. I actually switched to my podcast player all the youtube channels that also have a separate feed.

rictic 11y ago
Huh, I suspect we have very different consumption habits. I could predict ahead of time perhaps 5% of the youtube videos that I end up watching.
- hrktb 11y ago
  I think youtube is on your side, as it's heavily biased toward random one offs video watching. I'm always baffled by the suggestions when watching videos from some common series. There would be mostly accurate suggestions, and consistently two or three videos completely unrelated taken from my viewing history. For instance there would be 'Howto repair your dishwasher' in the middle of all the videos of a math channel. I tend to massively subscribe to channels and watch in batches, so I have (and want to have) a very good idea of what's coming next in my queue.

zokier 11y ago

But having URLs or discovery or social features is orthogonal to using web tech, especially in the front end. Eg. Spotify had all of those in a tight little native client, before they rewrote it with web stack with controversial results.

tw04 11y ago

So why shouldn't youtube just be an index of videos that then launch in a native local application? The only reason youtube is better on that front is because google.