this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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If the file is that poorly seeded, and therefore extremely sparsely watched, then the laptop with a broken screen in my closet can serve it to anyone who wants it.
The only reason we need a scalable system, is to handle high demand / broad appeal media and in that case, what you describe WON'T happen.
For low demand media, https off my mom's coffemaker will do just fine.
That means anyone posting 100-200 video to youtube today, can easily handle all these situation with less expense than the price of whatever camera they filmed the content with to begin with.
Youtube only exists, because us, old internet fucks, got lazy and relied on google for mail and video.
We could EASILY EASILY EASILY done it ourselves.
A service people want to use is typically one with redundancy and high availability. Your laptop could overheat, have a drive failure, spontaneously lose its wifi connection, or a million other things. It's fundamentally unreliable.
Scalability isn't just about distribution. It's about reliability and convenience - two things your system as described lacks by design. A video file that no one but you has ever seen has the same exact degree of accessibility as one served to millions.
This is the copium talking. If it had been easy to do and monetizable, it would have already been done. That's the other part of the problem here. There is no incentive for anyone to use this system to consume or distribute content other than to decouple from Google. Opposition to an existing service is not enough of a motivator for people to use a system. It has to provide some comparative benefit that outweighs the cost incurred by continuing to use the other service. The big thing that Youtube has is, obviously, content. Exabytes of it. Your new service would have...nothing. We have left the age of services starting up and gaining massive movements of people behind them. We are now in an age of the internet in which the inertia of existing services will carry them decades into the future. Youtube is now too big to fail, and too big to be replaced.
Blockbuster died because its business model was rendered obsolete by virtue of widespread adoption of the internet and the advent of streaming. And because it refused to shift its business model away from physical media distribution to digital. Let me know when they invent something that makes the internet obsolete, will you? Because that is what it will take to dethrone YouTube.
I think YouTube will eventually end up destroying itself. It's not a profitable business model to just run some ads. The amount of storage, bandwidth, and processing power a video host requires is massive.