So if there hadn’t been a giant company with ample resources to subsidize YouTube all that time, who could have built a comparable video service and how would it have survived? Wouldn’t that mean they would have had to squeeze viewers for money in the same way sooner?
There is no mandate that YouTube must exist in its current state. YouTube serves two roles, one as a free service to host videos, one as a roulette machine that might pay out money if your "content" is favored by "the algorithm".
A huge amount of videos on YouTube are created for their own sake, with no expectation of going viral or making money off them. PeerTube fulfills the "free video host" role while also being ad-free. I might be naive, but I believe this is how most people saw YouTube around 2012.
The "seeking to make money on YouTube" role is artificially created as a result of a massive corporation running a loss-leader for a decade, dictating what content gets popular through recommendation algorithms, and literally paying people to encourage them to produce more of the desired addicting content.
Who knows what would have happened if YouTube had not been bought out and been allowed to compete fairly with P2P technologies as they emerged.
P2P never really had a YouTube-like creator scene; almost everyone using P2P was using it to download movies for free. YouTube was almost the same way at first until YouTube got spooked by the (arguably baseless) Viacom lawsuit and decided to adopt proactive copyright filtering.
Speaking of litigation, nobody's been sued for watching YouTube. People got sued for BitTorrent traffic all the time; up to and including dedicated settlement extortion operations (e.g. Prenda Law). This is a third role of YouTube we don't really consider: they handle all the stupid copyright stuff so that users don't have to. P2P inherently shoves all the liability[0] onto the users because you dox yourself every time you use it. Imagine, say, someone suing individual P2P users to try and shut down, say, a SSSniperWolf[1] video.
If you took YouTube away today, you'd have creators moving to Nebula or Floatplane, because there's still money in that. There really isn't money in PeerTube. Monetization is the thing that really put YouTube on the map, not free distribution.
Though, to be clear, video distribution is still hilariously expensive. Google considers YouTube to be profitable and has done so for many years, but that is almost certainly because YouTube gets to use Google's favorable peering arrangements with last-mile ISPs. These same ISPs also did all sorts of questionable things to throttle or block BitTorrent traffic back in the day, I imagine they'd come up with new attacks on PeerTube traffic today. The underlying problem is that we don't have any common-carrier regulation on ISPs, so they price traffic based on "value" - i.e. how much they can double-bill the sender of the packets - rather than the cost of that traffic.
If you want a viable YouTube competitor, you want net neutrality regulation.
[0] Ok, before you cite a Ninth Circuit opinion arguing that mere downloading still has liability or something, I'm not saying that you CAN'T EVER be sued for watching YouTube, only that you'd have to sue Google first, and they have big pockets.
[1] Notorious "reaction streamer" that doesn't actually do any reacting in her videos made up of entirely other people's YouTube uploads. Recently infamous for tracking down JacksFilms' physical location and bragging about it on Instagram.
> A huge amount of videos on YouTube are created for their own sake, with no expectation of going viral or making money off them.
It's estimated that there are 1 billion YouTube videos, compared to 600k videos hosted by PeerTube. Thats a 4 order of magnitude difference. Saying that PeerTube can "fill this role" is an outrageous assumption about scaling.
Sure, I should have said "P2P based video sharing like PeerTube". The point is that for videos with no expectation of making money, P2P is a better model than YouTube, as it is both free and ad-free.
I am not saying that PeerTube is better and that people should be using it. I am saying that it is worse, because of the way YouTube developed and made competition impossible.
>who could have built a comparable video service and how would it have survived?
Don't conflate being unwilling to give Google money with being unwilling to give anyone money.
I want out - I want to switch to a competitor, I'll pay money to do so. But Google's anticompetitive practices have taken that option from me. They broke the system and then get mad when I refuse to work within that system; so what?
I’m familiar with Google’s anticompetitive behavior regarding search. What have they done in that way regarding YouTube other than just have a bunch of money to finance it?
> So if there hadn’t been a giant company with ample resources to subsidize YouTube all that time, who could have built a comparable video service and how would it have survived?
My two cents:
1. Decentralization. I run my own PeerTube instance, with a bunch of my videos and a few viewers per day, and it requires basically zero maintenance. A RPi4 with a decent SSD is more than enough to run it, and unless you get hundreds of views per minute a decent home broadband connection is also more than enough. If you get more traffic, you can always ask people to contribute - and most of the folks on decentralized networks usually are happy to contribute. Plus, being ActivityPub compatible, from a single Mastodon or PeerTube profile, or even any RSS/Atom reader, you can follow channels on any instance. We often underestimate how easy it has become to run your own stuff if you know how to run a Docker container, and how easy it is to use syndacation and open protocols to publish to one place and broadcast to everyone. For some reason, the "you need a big centralized platform with big servers that can autoscale, big financial backing and a big surveillance adware business model in order to serve some .mp4 files" dogma is hard to kill.
2. Creators-run platforms. I've been an early supporter of Nebula and I keep contributing to them. I get all the videos that my favourite educational creators post on YouTube, plus exclusive content, without ads and without YouTube's hostile practices, for ~$3/month, and I know that the platform is run by the creators themselves, so the money goes directly to them. The success of platforms like Nebula sends a clear message to YouTube: people are happier to pay a monthly subscription to a service that only offers a curated subset of what's available on YouTube, knowing that that money goes directly to the creators, rather than watching ads every 5 minutes on YouTube and getting all of Google's privacy-invasive and developer-hostile business practices.
If I understand it correctly, as a PeerTube viewer I'm not only downloading the video, but also sharing it. Before I watched it.
This is a problem in countries where uploading copyrighted and illegal material has strong legal consequences (so I'd not want to share a video before I watched it fully so I can at least can see it doesn't have any obvious illegal content)
The viewing-is-sharing model is indeed a problem of PeerTube - and, I'd argue, of any decentralized network based on a P2P mesh. But it definitely alleviates the content distribution asymmetry problem - by spreading the load on the viewers small/medium instances can afford to scale up much more easily.
You can alleviate the problem by browsing some "borderline" profiles/instances with Tor/VPN though, or even just disable the "Help share videos being played" setting from the profile settings.
This is faulty reasoning. Chocking all competitors in the crib does not mean there have not been competitors nor does it mean these platforms with superior UX could not still come to dominate.
But having the size of YT means it’s very hard to lose.
Personally, I wish platforms like peertube or bitchute would be much more know. But since YT is the place where everybody is watching it naturally follows that somebody new will post the video on YT first (and only) as well.
I don’t think the question is about a superior UX. It’s who could afford to run a huge video platform without moving to monetize it and achieve profitability in the way that Google is doing now.
Do we need a giant centralized video service? Wouldn't it be better to have smaller independent services which each can set their own moderation policies?
It’s a shame that RealPlayer is remembered like that, given that they were doing their best with 56k modem connections. My current internet connection is something like 15,000 times faster than in 2000, so I expect that I would probably not be waiting for buffering.
