Something relating to Youtube but not this specific article: there is always talk of a new Facebook, a new Twitter, but has anyone ever seen someone launch a "new Youtube"? I don't think I can ever recall any platform launching and being declared the killer of Youtube, the internet just accepts Youtube as the video platform and has done for a long time. With the focus on enabling even more good content to be produced (eg: Educational material) it seems Youtube may just stay that way... forever.
It's a harder technical problem than people think, in terms of scaling and encoding smoothly (and playing smoothly while the rest of the video loads, which Vimeo can't seem to do). Google also has tons of fibre in addition to server infrastructure.
It's also extremely hard to break even, as even a low resolution video in bandwidth terms is many times larger than a news article. News articles often manage to squeeze in more ads than YouTube did initially as well and news on the web is fairly cut-throat and thin margin. With an article you can just examine the plain text to put a relevant advert there, with video it's much harder (although certainly possible). There is also a problem with discovery and search related to this which needs high level machine learning and thus your average "we took a regular service - taxis, maids, food - and make a phone app which uses GPS and calls it to your house for a premium" type startup guys probably don't have a clue about what would be necessary.
There was also a lot of speculation that Google has been running YouTube at a loss since acquisition. If that's true it means that their partner program was paying content producers for a long time out of Google's pocket rather than out of real viability. So a competing site going for just technology needs to understand that they are competing with a distributed stable of talent. The same goes for paying money to music producers. A startup would get legally slammed just as they were taking off (and running out of runway). Perhaps the more aggressive advertising and long commercials at the start of videos is now exploiting this subsidy-created monopoly, and perhaps in turn that will give rise to a competitor.
edits: multiple, "steaming smoothly" to "playing smoothly"
> and playing smoothly while the rest of the video loads, which Vimeo can't seem to do
I've always had at least sporadic problems with YouTube's buffering, especially at 1080p. I have a very reliable 50Mbit connection, but often I find that YouTube can't stream fast enough.
Usually it's only with certain videos; popular videos always buffer very quickly, which makes me think it's something to do with how they tune their CDN.
The YouTube team has just done a phenomenal job scaling to demand and building a simple, no-frills-attached platform.
What does YouTube fail on that we need an alternative for? Fast download speeds, speedy uploads, many ads that YOU CAN JUST SKIP (!!), it seems like they have nailed the perfect spec and product. Plus, I don't think many could even dream of competing with the technical demands that YouTube probably sees every minute on their servers.
I am actually surprised no one has pointed out Dailymotion a Youtube like service which does well in France [0,1]. It has most feature which Youtube provides.
One of the founders of YouTube - Steve Chen - worked as a Senior Software Engineer at Facebook for a few months in 2005 before leaving to start YouTube. He is one of the first 20 employees of Facebook [2].
Good point. The only other competitive product I can think of is Vimeo but it's more niche. It seems to be mainly very high quality videos and artsy videos. I guess Facebook is also a competitor but personally I rarely see videos uploaded to it.
