• Tregetour@lemdro.id
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      1 day ago

      People get proccupied with emulating YT, which is indeed cost prohibitive. But that response assumes one is emulating all of it. What about only pursuing sections of it to cater to particular audiences? Serving 100% of YT’s video might be too much even for Amazon (for example) but what about 1%?

      Why couldn’t Amazon host Booktube? And the manga/anime enthusiasts and other varietes of weebs to go along with them? They already own ebook retail. A VOD service to chip off some of YT’s viewership would be a more productive investment than The Rings of Power…

      A YT competitor needs a bit of scale, sure, but not as much as YT itself. A fraction will do.

      • howrar@lemmy.ca
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        20 hours ago

        I believe the main cost is in hosting all the videos. A lot of them are probably junk that were never meant to see the light of day. I certainly use it as an extra backup for many of my videos with no context and random UUID titles.

        For everything else, a potential solution is to have everyone come in with their own videos hosted elsewhere and the platform just integrated with a bunch of APIs for fetching and serving those videos. For small time creators, the cost should be fairly low to none since a lot of platforms allow you to store a small number of files for free.

    • amorangi@lemmy.nz
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      2 days ago

      By operating youtube at a loss for many years Google acted anticompetitively to kill competition or stop competition arising. Now that they’ve achieved that they can do what they like. Don’t feel bad using ad blockers against this anti-capitalist company.

    • Chaotic Entropy@feddit.uk
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      2 days ago

      Hosting and storage costs, few can afford to be an alternative to an absolutely gigantic video storage platform that costs obscene money to maintain.

    • GrumpyDuckling@sh.itjust.works
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      1 day ago

      OK, so a bittorrent tracker site with a video player built in with comments underneath and you can get perks from content creators for seeding. Then of course some kind of voting system and etc. Then a creator can just get a seed box to start hosting their own videos.

      • atlien51@lemm.ee
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        2 days ago

        You’re right :)

        I meant idk something like Oddysse (but a website with actual moderation)

        • ewenak@jlai.lu
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          2 days ago

          Do you know of PeerTube? It’s not mainstream at all either, but it seems more known to me.

          It’s also in the fediverse, and isn’t accused of the same moderation issues (though idk if PeerTube is really better than Odyssee at moderation, I suppose it’s just a difference in policy).

          Edit: I read a bit about it, and I can see I was wrong about Odyssee being less known than PeerTube. It’s strange, I never heard of it, but anyway. Odyssee also includes some crypto bullshit, so yeah…

    • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      22 hours ago

      It’s a very difficult business model to make profitable without an already massive userbase. In fact, I think YT was actually losing money for Google for a while after they bought it. I could be misremembering though.

      • atlien51@lemm.ee
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        22 hours ago

        Yes but not everything needs to make a profit, just not make a loss. Also it could be community supported with donations and stuff:)

        • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          16 minutes ago

          YouTube was operating at a loss under Google for years. The only reason it is able to exist is because a massive entity like Google was able to absorb that without folding, and keep providing a free service until it becomes profitable (is it even yet? I’m not sure).

          I mean fuck Google, and yes a big enough non-profit (or even government) could do it (probably better), but unfortunately that’s not the world we live in right now.