this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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Wouldn't it be neat if YouTube had reasonable competition? You know, so when YouTube adds a five-second delay as a strange style of punishment, a different platform would look more attractive?
There will never be a real competitor to YouTube, because nobody else is willing to run at a net loss for a decade before seeing their first profitable quarter, like Google did with YouTube.
Turns out, free video hosting is expensive as fuck.
That sounds reasonable but you're thinking way too small. Lets not forget that Tiktok is already more popular than YouTube with a very, very large chunk of younger people, for example.
But besides that, let's not forget that absolute giants in the business have been toppled. Look at Yahoo! as one example. Hell, even entire countries can fall within a few decades, whole empires.
So, assuming that there will never be a decent YouTube competitor is a very limited way of looking at it. Who's to say Google will still exist in any meaningful market leading way in 20 years?
Sure they're big now, but what if the entire face of the internet and how we use it and what we want fundamentally changes (say with the addition of highly advanced AI that brings changes we can't even predict right now).
There will absolutely one day be a service that can rival YouTube and eventually replace them, it's the same with every product from every business, it's the circle of life I suppose. But whether that will happen within the next 5 years, or 15, or 30, only time can tell :-D
Never say never, though!
Im surprised Amazon hasn’t stepped into the space to advertise their own products. They already own a huge storage cloud backend.
Its so strange they let their users store 2 hour+ VODS but dont let users upload edited videos? Would make so much sense and even save them storage since user’s would replace VODs with edited videos since no one watches VODs
In the relatively rare cases that I watch stuff on twitch, I usually watch the VODs. Don't have the time or energy to sit though hours of a stream in one sitting, nor am I usually able to catch one live, nor do I like feeling like I'll miss something if I have to leave early, so I prefer to just watch the recordings of them at my own pace over multiple sessions.
I often watch vods. My favorite streamer's time zone and streaming schedule mean that I can only catch a couple of hours of the beginning of their stream before going to bed, and I couldn't regularly watch 8-10 hours of stream in one go anyway, so I watch the vods of the streams I want to see the rest of.
I'm guessing that it is probably them being comfortable with their niche, and they don't think they can break into the YouTube model the same way YouTube couldn't break into the Twitch model with YouTube Gaming (#killedbygoogle)
...i'm surprised pornhub hasn't rolled out an all-ages video site...
They already make a killing with their cloud with much less business risk in the form of AWS.
Maybe. But give decentralised federated hosting a few years. It might never be a rival but it's possible it will become a viable alternative.
If PeerTube can fix their major discoverability issues, it can potentially pose a real threat to YouTube. But that's the biggest thing keeping it back right now, is that it's impossible to just find anything you want to watch.
Unless you want to watch hour-long seminars on Linux. In which case, PeerTube's got you covered.
I think discoverability is in its infancy for the fediverse in general.
But I'm old enough to remember when vast tracts of the internet were hard to find and everyone used directories. When that changed, everyone jumped online.
Yet there is a gazillion of porn sites out there. The thing is, once YouTube become shitty enough its users are itching to find an alternative, porn operators like MindGeek might launch a competitor site because they're already have a scalable video delivery service. I wouldn't be surprised if they're already working on it.
It's not really a technical problem anymore. Which isn't to say it's easy to run such a site, but rather to stress that YouTube is like a social media site. The value is in the users (and the content that they create and consume). You could make a perfect YouTube clone, but good luck getting people to use it when their favourite creators don't. And good luck getting creators to care when the users aren't there.
And Lemmy is misleading. Most people don't use Firefox. Heck, most people don't seem to even use ad blockers.