We need a publicly funded video hosting service like PBS.
Good luck getting that through the system… the cost to run something like YouTube is… well, let’s just say the lack of real competitions speaks volumes.
The biggest drain is the copyright fights, I’m guessing. Defending against and pleasing every big company with an interest.
That’s a drop in the pond in the grand scheme of things. You just out source that out to rights management companies and absolve yourself from that obligation behind safe harbour. This is basically what they’re doing in this department. They’ve built Content ID for digital finger printing, and then invented an entire market for rights management companies on both sides of the equation.
On the other hand, 500 hours of video footage got uploaded to YouTube every minute per YouTube in 2022 (pdf warning). 30 minutes of video game content (compresses better), just the 720p variant using avc1 codec is about 443MB of space. Never mind all the other transcodes or higher bitrates. So say 800MB per hour of 720p content; 500 hours of content per minute means 400GB of disk space requirement, per minute; 500TB of disk space per day.
That’s just video uploaded to YouTube. I don’t even know how much is being watched regularly, but even if we assume at least one view per video, that’s 500TB of bandwidth in and then 500TB of bandwidth out per day.
Good luck scaling that on public budget.
Extrapolating from this, we can say that Youtube hosts around 2.5 to 3 exabytes (2.5 to 3 million terabytes) of data. Interestingly, the total volume of data on the internet is, as of the end of 2023, around 120 zettabytes, so Youtube only makes up around 0.0025% of the total volume of all that data.
Most of the remaining space is used by porn obviously…
No, it’s a picture of your mum, cos she’s so fat. I’m sorry
Yes, the state is subservient to capital.
the infrastructure cost required to host the quantity of video YouTube has is insane.
Microsoft could have done it if storage was all. They got the infrastructure, the tech, cdn infrastructure , and even had a lot of big business customers already using Azures media streaming services. Instead they are withdrawing.
And the fact that Microsoft noped out says it all.
Basically, the only orgs that have a snowball’s chance of hosting a twitch/youtube are Amazon, Google, and Microsoft on account of them also being three of the largest “cloud” providers and having the resources at cost. Amazon/Twitch are scrambling to find a way to deal with the increasing shift to sponsored streams, Google/Youtube are cracking down on adblockers, and Microsoft just gave up.
I said infrastructure, not just storage. and yes there is even more involved like the user base, as we have seen with social media time and time again. Even if Microsoft built an even better YouTube (lol), it’s still very likely no one would use it. It’s a massive investment with a lot of risk.
every computer gets a government-mandated tool installed that reserves 50% of your upload speed to help host YouTube. If you are caught without it, You’re going to jail.
/s
You say that like they even look at them. That’s clearly not the case.
Of course they dont. Not a chance with that much video added every hour. Also everything gotta be automated. And in favor of those who can make the most legal trouble. And thats companies, not the many various smaller IP-owners.
Just rubs me the wrong way that only Google are finding this business worth it. None of the other companies, even with massive amounts of storage and cdn infrastructure, are able to compete for long.
China did it…https://www.youku.tv/ probably the EU could do it too, if it cared about owning its own critical infrastructure.
Japan has nicovideo.jp as well. Russia has Yandex Efir (gone through a couple rebrands, Efir was the name in 2020 when we were discussing deals; it was operating under another name prior, and I think it is superseded by dzen). Off to the side I think vK also has a small video delivery presence like how Facebook has videos in their feeds. China has several platforms: Tencent Video (owned by Tencent), Youku as you’ve called out (owned by Alibaba), XiGua (ByteDance), Haokan (Baidu), and then slew of smaller ones like KuaiShou, BiliBili and that video thing WeChat tries to push. None of these are public service operated by the State, by the way. List really goes on… and I’d know, because I’ve worked in the space for almost 12 years now.
China’s great firewall aside, all these platforms are tiny in comparison, and in the grand scheme of things, and barely have any reach. In general, these regional are all taking a backseat just like Nebula and alike — if creators’ content are hyperlocal/super niche, they might be okay with smaller regional platforms; but if they’re trying to extend their reach and monetization (to ensure they have money to continue producing content), the creators’ presence on these platforms are really just auxiliary to their primary presence on YouTube.
Getting viewers to these smaller platforms is going to pose a significant chicken or the egg problem — creators aren’t incentivized to be there because lack of viewer, viewers aren’t incentivized to go there because lack of content. Worse yet, I’ve also seen situations where creators are paid for some period of exclusivity and then when the deal lapses they just go straight back to YouTube.
Real competitors do not exist, and likely will not exist for the foreseeable future. YouTube is the million pound behemoth when everyone else barely registers on the radar.
We have torrent technology, we just need to make it a little more dynamic.
If we fund a peertube instance we could do that.
There are lots of peertube instances. The issue is that YouTube uses ads to pay content creators, and so everyone puts their content on YouTube in the hope of becoming the next big thing.
Most YouTubers rely on sponsorships and/or Patreon subscriptions. Getting compensation is not a platform problem.
The reason why content creators choose YouTube is because that’s where all the viewers are. Few people know about peertube. Even fewer have used it.
Sort of.
The issue isn’t userbase size. Plenty of creators have tried to have their own private hosting over the years. The fact that the “successful” ones are Rooster Teeth (dead), Giant Bomb (basically dead), and Linus Media Group (unfortunately not dead, but shifting ever more toward right wing grifting) says a lot.
The issue, as those channels learned, is discoverability. If your entire fanbase go to giantbomb.com to watch videos then you aren’t getting surfaced in the youtube/whatever algorithm. So as your userbase leaves (get pissed off, get older, die, etc) you don’t have a good way to replace them and you more or less wither and die. You could see this on the forums (and the threads on sites that still have forums) where you almost never saw a new fan show up and it increasingly became all about the more vocal members of “the community” as even the fans started to nope out of chat (because nobody gives a shit about the guy whose gimmick is that he kept saying he was a duck…) and forums (because we don’t care about the guy who can’t stop talking about how “kino” Snyder films are).
And that is why stuff like Nebula, Gun Jesus’s latest side hustle, Corridor Digital’s site, etc are very much dependent on relying on Youtube for the “advertising”. It says a lot that most of us only even check Nebula when we see a new Legal Eagle or Nile Red video on youtube and want to watch the ad-free version.
Ltt right wing grifting ? Are we on the same planet ? They’re milquetoast liberals at worst and they try not to, sometimes.
The list of all the horrifically shitty things LMG has done over the past few years will fill up a thread on its own and I strongly encourage you to educate yourself before even thinking of defending them for… anything.
But some highlights:
- Over the span of a week or two went from “Companies aren’t your friend. I am not your friend” to “Written warranties are worthless and can only hurt you so you shouldn’t want them. Also, if there were a written warranty and I were to die then my wife (who just so happens to be the CFO and second biggest shareholder in the company…) would suffer from harassment. So written warranties are bad and just trust me bro”. This was bad enough that his decades long crony (Luke) even openly criticized him
- Stole a GPU from a small company, shit on their prototype for weeks on end even after knowingly using it with the wrong card, and then sold the prototype cooler to a random third party. Proceeded to make claims (that the timeline doesn’t even work for) that they resolved this before anyone caught them and their main argument is they accidentally removed said company from those emails where they were “solving” it.
- Have increasingly openly acknowledged they will do big pieces on products they hate if the money is right. I think the most recent shitfests are a pool cleaning robot that barely functions and now sponsorshipps from one of the shittier VPN companies because the money is really really good.
- Responded to an “internal investigation” of sexual harassment and assault claims (where at least one perpetrator is literally recorded sexually harassing the entire company… during the all hands about sexual harassment… literally the day after his direct report left the company because of being sexually harassed) by talking about how they will sue any future whistle blowers or accusers for defamation.
- Went full “but the white man is the real victim” after even d-brand acknowledged a fuck up where they “roasted” an Indian guy because they thought his name was funny
- Basically turn every single accusation into “They are personally attacking Linus Sebastien because they are jealous of his success and genius” level cancel culture nonsense
They are rapidly circling the drain and I for one am waiting for the “Well, these aren’t tech so we don’t have a conflict of interest and you should buy some joe rogan branded supplements” within the next few months. Likely because more and more actual tech companies don’t even want to deal with them for the PR boost.
Very true. It’s not so much the hosting, it’s monetary value.
It’s also the hosting. YouTube has hundreds of hours of high-res video uploaded to it every single minute, and then has to process and mirror that content across its global distribution network. Just the hardware required to make that function, alone, is prohibitively expensive for any other contenders to enter this space.
The top Youtubers are making millions, easy…
Yep, definitely. That’s the allure. From what I can tell, it’s likely there are tens of thousands of people making over $1m a year. However, there are hundreds of millions of people uploading videos.
Most people won’t make much at all, but if you don’t have the people at the top making millions then no one has any incentive, so those people are critical.
Classic pyramid scheme of capitalism.
What people need to do is start self-hosting PeerTube IMO.
People refuse to even let an ad play but sure, they’ll participate in the pledge drives
Ads are not just inconvenient but very often annoying and misleading, so I can’t blame anyone for that.
Micropayment donations might, though. It’s not annoying, not misleading, and there is a considerable amount of people even now that regularly donate/otherwise support their favorite content creators, and this would be even more convenient because it is automatic and the amount depends on how much time did you watch videos.
And it doesn’t even necessarily depend on cryptocurrencies.The amount of people who would pay is going to be near zero in the grand scheme of things.
Next time you’re anywhere where you could discretely look at people’s phones, see how many of them run apps with ads. Most apps will offer very cheap IAP to remove ads, but people choose to not pay it. Vast majority of the users have already decided that their time wasted on ads are worth less than whatever tiny monetary cost it would be to remove them. Same thing here: Vast majority of the users have already decided they’re not going to pay to get rid of the ads. This in turn means due to how few people who would be willing to pay, it is not going to be nearly sufficient to keep the infrastructure required up and running, as well as keep the creators compensated for creating the content.
That’s already a thing, my guy.
What is it?
Its called PBS
Can I freely upload my niché videos of USB cable testing there? PS, I’m not a US citizen.
No
Then how is it a replacement for YouTube?
at that point why not just subscribe to yt premium?
Public service =/= privately owned mega corp
I haven’t experienced any of the problems mentioned in this article while using Firefox + uBO (on Windows, Linux, and Fennec fork on Android), nor while using the Tubular app on Android.
Its likely to be a slow rollout thing. I havent either for what its worth.
I did have a couple of videos fail to play, but they worked on refresh so I assume that was unrelated.
If a YouTube ad installs a virus on my system, can I sue YouTube?
I doubt viewing the ad on YouTube would give you a virus. You’d have to click on the ad, leave YouTube, and at that point google would wash their hands of it and say it’s your fault.
Google has literally deployed crypomining malware through adsence. They don’t check ad code before deploying it.
that’s a lot different than just running a video clip.
Some people prefer to mine in the background than watch ads
If YouTube takes files from 3rd parties and simply displays them, then viruses are possible. This is more true of ads placed via ad-broker on other websites. To get ad revenue a webmaster provides a space where the ad is inserted. The ad is provided by a 3rd party who pays the ad broker for placement. Neither the webmaster nor the ad broker have any visibility into the content of the ad, which could even contain code (ads which move or present UI elements have code to make those things work)
YouTube is the virus
No, you cannot, because you’re the one who chose to disable the adblockers that NIST and/or CISA (can’t remember if it’s both entities) highly encourage everyone to use.
E: I reread it, and it sounds I’m being mean. I was, in fact, being facetious. I’m on the same mindset as you, and I will sooner not use YouTube than disable antiadware protection.
But I would not have disabled my ad blocker in other circumstances, but YouTube is forcing me to disable it against my better judgment to be able to use the site.
Oh, no, I agree with you. But google doesn’t care.
Sure! There’s zero likelihood of this ever happening, but in the weird universe where it does you can probably sue them for coming around and shaving your dog too.
Moving to Albania might solve the problem.
i don’t see why you wouldn’t just get premium? it’s probably one of the better streaming service platforms since i watch youtube and twitch more than i watch anything on peacock, paramount, etc plus it comes with youtube music
because fuck Google
yet you still want to use their services?
They’re a monopoly. I don’t feel bad blocking ads from a monopolist that monetizes my data whether or not I block their ads.
What are they a monopoly of?
In this case, they are a monopoly because they are the only company that even wants to try and make something as massive as youtube work.
But, regardless: It is fine to not “feel bad” about running an adblocker. Just don’t “feel bad” when youtube runs a you-blocker as a result.
Just like “they” were free to harvest personal data unless the user was able to block it, I’m going to freely watch YouTube unless they’re able to block me. Of course I’m going to feel bad if they manage to block me and that’s going to incentivize me to find a different way of accessing YouTube until there’s no paths left and then I’ll simply stop using the platform.
So… to punish them for “harvesting” your data you are going to… continue to give them your data.
They are not the only company to try, they are however the only company simply allowed to do it. Go ahead, try to start your own database, host peoples videos, see how quickly you’re either forced to sell, or litigated out of a business.
Please do continue to tell us how YouTube being a monopoly is purely a choice, and not by design.
I mean… plenty of youtubers and channels are doing exactly that. Ian McCollum (Forgotten Weapons) and the “educational” gun youtubers have History of Weapons and War. A bunch of creators did Nebula. Corridor Digital have their channel. That comedy channel that came from college humor have their own site? Same with those two channels that pissed everyone off in the past few weeks? And Linus Media Group have been trying to add “we run a shitty version of youtube” to their grift for years now. And Rooster Teeth and Giant Bomb had their own video site for basically the entirety of their runs.
Let alone stuff like Utreon and the other one. And then there are the various successors to liveleak that are basically about spamming yu with an insane amount of spyware and ads in exchange for letting you upload faces of death.
And while I think it is a fundamentally flawed idea that mostly just does the legwork for those sites to run the software: Peertube is a thing and there are plenty of instances that exist.
So I am REALLY curious what evil organization you think is waiting to kill anything that is not made by Youtube. If you comply with DMCA requests and don’t host CSAM then it is just a function of whether you can afford it.
Which… is the real issue. There is just a ridiculous volume of storage and bandwidth required for even a “small” youtube. Which is why almost all of the successful “alternatives” only really host a very small subset of videos.
If Google is a monopoly (it’s not), it’s only a monopoly because they’ve cornered the market through previously good service. Now they’re using this power to inflict larger and larger amounts of time theft, brainwashing, etc. It is actually good to block this trash and “evil” to profit from it.
If Google is a monopoly (it’s not)
The US DOJ doesn’t agree with you, they’re in the midst of suing them for antitrust.
“Time theft” is very questionable and more a topic for society as a whole but…
Okay? Then don’t watch youtube. Rather than allow them to engage in “time theft” but calling yourself smart because you don’t watch ads.
Also: As has been pointed out repeatedly in this thread, the scale of Youtube (and Twitch) is massive and truly hard to comprehend. The only companies that even have a snowball’s chance of running that are Google, Amazon, and MS because they ALSO have giant “cloud” services. And… it is pretty clear none of them really know how to run a site like that (hence why MS just gave up entirely).
I want to watch the videos that people created. None of that belongs to Google. Google is just an increasingly aggressive leech in the middle.
google hosts the videos they create and compensates them…
Yes. I want full access to everything without paying a dime, no ads and no tracking.
Fuck off, Google.
yeah so much better to create 50 posts every day whining because google is stopping your adblocker /s
Tell your bosses I’ll subscribe once they figure out what fair use is.
They don’t deserve my money, they already harvest enough of my data.
“Why don’t you just bend over and take it!”
No ma’am I don’t think I will. Interesting suggestion though.
In fact the ads are not really a big problem for me (if they’re not too much present) but the trackers behind are much more, so what is the point of paying to have the same amount of trackers, most of the time I watch my YouTube creators on privacy focused solution or going to peertube for the rest
Dude, I have YouTube music and I literally am not able to change or upgrade to YouTube premium. They don’t let me, it links me to a useless empty page with no options. I don’t even know what the price is like. This whole subscription thing is a mess.
I solved it by using YouTube revanced and have all premium functions and more. On desktop I wrote my own player. It’s so much better because their website is a mess. At this point do I really want to pay for features I know I won’t use?
lol
It’s an unpopular opinion but I do agree with this. Google deserves to get a lot of shit for a lot of things, but even after how far downhill YouTube has gone it’s still the best hosting/streaming service out there.
Between podcasts at work and normal videos at home I probably watch more than 8hrs of YouTube a day with no issues. I may as well pay for it like I would Netflix, considering I get, like, 20x more out of it in comparison.
If there was a non-enshittified alternative, though, I’d gladly pay for it.
Most importantly because I don’t want to support that wholly unethical company that google is, and I think nobody else should. They already have plenty of money, which would be enough, if they wouldn’t be a publicly traded company with endless thirst for more and more and more and more.
As much as it pains me to say it, I agree and am annoyed at the amount of “no, fuck Google” in response. I agree, fuck Google, but not because they’re charging for a service so good that we all use it, fuck Google for its heavy user tracking of paying users. I understand it costs immensely to host the sheer amount of data that they do, and they still allow creators to have a portion of what’s made from each video. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about sticking to the man and all that, but to want a website that provides the same service without any costs involved is unreasonable. Peertube is the closest solution we see, and there are still costs involved for anyone hosting a server. I hate that YouTube is our only real option and I’d love something different, but they already have all of our content, and ultimately, they’re fairly reasonable with their demands (pay for our service or watch our ads). The amount of user tracking they do is what’s unacceptable to me, but that’s across all of their products, and I would love to see some enforcement of minimum required data.
