• @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      11 year ago

      demanding they pay for a service that is worse than what adblockers already offer

      Or you could say they have tolerated adblockers until now and allowed you to use their service without a paywall. Yes, it sucks, we’re used to blocking ads, but it was like having free lunch.

      whilst also running a business that relies solely on critical mass of users rather than any actual value that youtube themselves can uniquely provide

      There have been plenty of other platforms who tried to do what YouTube did, they all failed. YouTube provides a massive infrastructure, about one hour of video is getting uploaded to their servers every second. And it must be kept around, so the amount of data only goes up. A total nobody can upload a 100 hours of video and YouTube will gladly accept that and still make those videos available 5 years from now.

      To say they don’t provide a relatively unique (or at least very difficult) service is insanity.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          11 year ago

          I pay a very small fee for debrid and VPN servers that offer exactly the same server capacity with enormous bandwidth and virtually no downtime.

          Did you just compare your small private server with YouTube’s infrastructure? Jesus Christ.

          Google had already been paying about 2 million a month for bandwidth in 2015 or so.

          I work for a larger company as a software developer, even with a billion in gross sales, there is absolutely no chance to provide even a tenth of YouTube’s service. Especially for free (without paywalls). The company would go bust in two years.

            • @[email protected]
              link
              fedilink
              English
              11 year ago

              VPN has absolutely nothing to do with hosting a video platform, no clue why you even bring it up.

              Debrids is just a file download service, isn’t it? But even if it was a video hosting platform, a single server would never be enough. You need at least two (as a fall back). Then you need dynamic scaling for bigger user numbers, which works just fine for CPU and RAM (or even GPU resources), but doesn’t work for storage. So you need extra storage somewhere all servers have access to, but when it comes to videos you’d be paying millions in no time.

              So you need your own cheap storage and datacenters around the world. And CDNs on top to serve your content worldwide (otherwise the experience would suck on another continent if your server is too far away).

              Look up how Google does it, they have their own data storage centers. And if your video is crappy and you’re a nobody, it probably gets stored in a slower location on-demand. So it also loads slower. But if your video is in high-demand with millions of views it gets pushed into a more accessible location (and gets higher priority for CDNs). It’s not just hosting, there is a massive amount of logic and software behind the stack.

                • @[email protected]
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  11 year ago

                  You use a VPN when you either don’t trust your ISP (or the current network connection you are on) or you want to hide who you really are on the internet. Both are absolutely unnecessary when accessing a video hosting platform (you can do this, but you don’t have to). A VPN is also more on the user side of things to connect to a server, the server doesn’t care if you use a VPN.

                  Debrid just makes accessing files easier as far as I can see. Like you give it a torrent link and it provides you a direct download? That’s nice and all for piracy, but has absolutely nothing to do with a video hosting platform like YouTube. You could use Debrid to download the video file from a host, but we are talking about providing the actual host you store the videos on.

                  I absolutely do not get the points you are trying to make, do you have an example for an infrastructure like YouTube you could build out of a VPN and Debrid?

                  Peertube would be an alternative of course, but it obviously has tons of its own issues (mainly resources, it still costs too much to host a large instance and if you try to access one video a million times things would straight up implode). I don’t see a realistic YouTube alternative without investing millions.