| >The point I think both of you are dancing around, but not hauling out into the light, is these platforms enable the abstraction of the techie work, No, not the techie work. In both of my previous comments, I de-emphasized the technical reasons. Instead, I've tried to emphasize that the killer feature of Youtube for the content creator is the simplifying of finances down to $0 costs for distributing video. Others may argue that "audience & discoverability" is equal to (or more important than) the $0 costs to distribute. That's valid as well. Since a technical solution of self-hosted video web stack does not solve $0 distribution costs and audience reach, it is irrelevant to the discussion. (Context of discussion was parent comments by fiala__ & ralphstodomingo talking about "scale" and "discoverability".[0]) To add some counterbalance, it does not mean Youtube's "value proposition" of $0 payment for audience reach is always a good deal. An example of this is Netflix. They don't need nor want Youtube's servers to host videos. >Creators are so dependent on not having to do the techie work, Again, this type of statement is evidence of techies misunderstanding Youtube. Even if the content creator hired a techie such as a webmaster to set up a self-hosted video site, it still does not solve the problem that Youtube solves. Even if you gave a set-&-forget "video hosting web appliance" to a content creator, it still doesn't solve the same problems that Youtube solves. In both cases of those technical solutions, you've created new problems that the content creator doesn't want to deal with! [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19937280 |