[askafriend]

> Building YouTube was a herculean endeavor 15 years ago, but today you can hack a YouTube clone together in hours.

Ha, good one.

Would your clone have large scale spam, fraud, and abuse systems in place? Would it work on all browsers, mobile devices, TVs, set-top boxes, etc? Is your streaming tech cost-efficient and can it deliver reliability across all regions? Will you be able to respond to DMCAA takedown requests and comply with IP laws across states and countries?

I can go on and on.

Simply put, serving a video over the internet isn't rocket science. Building YouTube...is much more like rocket science.

[erikpukinskis]

You don't need those things until after you hit scale, so I wouldn't include them in an initial quote.