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by anonms-coward 2177 days ago
Is cloudflare at a scale where it would be possible for them to provide cheap enough prices on video hosting and bandwidth to enable someone to build a profitable YouTube alternative on top of that? Assuming that a youtube competitor can get to similar scale and make similar revenue.
2 comments
paulpan 2177 days ago
The competitive advantage of YouTube isn't really in video storage or bandwidth, but rather in its creators community and ad revenue sharing/monetization. Also copyright, regulatory compliance, content moderation are non-trivial.

These are the causes (among many others) that sunk Microsoft's Mixer and potentially Facebook Watch...

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angel_j 2177 days ago
No, it needed network and storage first, losing billions for years in order to supply the creators with a service. The non-trivial factors could be trivialized by better community moderation features and niche networks.
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monkeywork 2177 days ago
youtubes competitive advantage is search... that plus the simple scale of users and content.
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solarkraft 2177 days ago
> youtubes competitive advantage is search

How? YouTube videos aren't all that prominent on Google and its search features are rather terrible.

What they do have is a semi working recommendations system. How hard would that be to replicate?

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jpalomaki 2177 days ago
They have a service for streaming stored video.

”$1 per 1,000 minutes viewed, $5 per 1,000 minutes of video storage”

https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-stream/

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kevincox 2176 days ago
I'm scared to calculate how much it would cost to run YouTube off of that.

Many years ago I remember that YouTube reported that 24h of video was uploaded every second. This means that your storage cost would increase by $432/s or $37M/d. This means that you are paying 14B/month by the end of the year just for storage.

Of course there are a number of factors that will work in your favour here: - You can attempt to focus on only hosting "popular" content instead of allowing anyone to upload. However this can make it difficult to draw new creators to the platform. - You can definitely negotiate a better rate.

However I'm still under the impression that if you want to create a YouTube competitor you are probably better of starting with lower level components so that you are in a position to reduce costs for old and low traffic videos. My impression of Cloudflare Stream is that it is aimed for people sharing a relatively small amount of content (probably just their own).

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