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!
TikTok isn't YouTube. It's two different method to consume videos. TikTok doesn't replace YouTube per se. Some people split the available attention time between them and in favor of TikTok.
It will be hard to compete on the YouTube field. But, there is multiple places for a different way to consume video with a different user experience.
On the YouTube field, it will be hard. I don't see creator moving with their community. The same issue has with let say Reddit, Twitter, etc.
That’s the commenter’s point: YouTube might not be replaced, but that doesn’t mean it cannot disappear.
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.
It's funny too because ads literally are a 5 second delay (at least) that you get when you dont use an adblocker!
I honestly think I prefer the delay over the ad.
Same. Give me the delay. At least I know that’s only five seconds, as opposed to a ten-second unskippable ad followed by another ad that I can skip after five seconds.
You're absolutely right, but we haven't even touched on the worst part of ads, which is how they utterly poison your brain with annoying jingles, annoying colors, and stupid catch-phrases, all psychologically engineered to get stuck in your head.
And let's not even go into how they prey on your fears and insecurities, or deceive you into thinking you need things that you actually don't. How they prey on vulnerable children, or the elderly, or brainwash small children into manipulating their parents against their best interests. Or how privacy has been shredded since the advent of behavioral tracking.
I'm not exaggerating at all when I say that advertising is one of the world's biggest psychological hazards. I would rather sit in an empty room with no stimulation whatsoever than let that poison into my brain.
If I see an unskippable ad, I like to play the game "Roll the dice until Youtube gives up". Hit the refresh key until it gives me the correct video length. Devalues Youtube's ad product and costs YouTube more.
am close video on mobile
That is the way to do it. Then open it on NewPipe or another 3rd party app without ads if you want to see it.
They're still letting you skip ads??
At some point Hulu did that - just like three, thirty-second blocks of silent 'shame on you for ad blocking!' I totally preferred that to ads...
Now I just don't use Hulu?
Ah, the good old days. Put on your show, get up and grab your snack/drink, come back just in time for the show to start, no ads the rest of the way
And even before that when adblockers just straight up worked on Hulu no shame screens to be found
I've been using Nebula. It's a subscription-based alternative with no advertising, but I get it for free because I'm subscribed to Curiosity Stream (which is basically Netflix, but for documentaries).
The only downside to Nebula is that there aren't a lot of content creators on it, so you don't have the variety of videos that YouTube offers.
The captions suck too. I subscribed to the same deal as you. I did it mostly to support the creators. But I basically never use it. The creator whose affiliate link I used to sign up? Their own captions are amazing on YouTube (human written with colour and positioning) and auto generated garbage on Nebula.
I'm still waiting for MindGeek to launch an SFW version of pornhub to compete with YouTube. If YouTube keeps getting shittier, they might eventually do it.
Turns out people don't want to compete with something that runs at a loss. and as soon as someone figures out how Google will just copy them with a massive infrastructure lead.
Peertube is almost there. Just needs a good server really, most of the servers are too small for the market share. Or at least fit the general public, I'm loving it ATM.