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YouTube has now begun skipping videos altogether for users with ad blockers
(www.androidpolice.com)
We need a publicly funded video hosting service like PBS.
this post was submitted on 28 May 2024
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Technology
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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
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the infrastructure cost required to host the quantity of video YouTube has is insane.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Moving to Albania might solve the problem.
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