[nathanyz]

Up front disclosure, I am the founder of a video hosting company.

I think you have very quickly found the reason for YouTube boiling the frog. Bandwidth, encoding, and storage all have costs associated with them. They are not simply free and so YouTube has to pay for these costs somehow.

There has been a mindset shift in the Internet at some point where originally people paid for premium services, and then it swung to everything for FREE. But nothing is actually free, what happened is a tradeoff in who pays from the end consumer/producer, you, to advertising companies.

So it's now up to all of us as users of the Internet whether we are happy with that deal. I personally am not, as allowing someone else to shape my thoughts in exchange for free services is not something I believe is beneficial to humanity. I'm doing my part, but it's up to each and everyone else to make their choice and do their's. Or don't if you are satisfied with the current deal.

[tachyonbeam]

On the storage front, it seems to me like you could get around that a bit by not keeping content forever. You could make a more ephemeral video hosting site.

As for paying for content, I think there's an opportunity to combine ideas from YouTube with Patreon. Tipping or supporting specific content creators you like. You move away from an ad-driven model towards a model where you get some basic content for free, but you can pay extra for more content.

[nathanyz]

These are good ideas. Our theory is that by simplifying the complexity of video hosting, it makes it viable for more people to test against various business models without having to do the heavy lifting of figuring out video encoding, delivery, and storage just to start. Basically similar to the role that WordPress, et al provided for websites themselves.

There is likely some new model that doesn't require fully ad-based or fully premium paid. We work with customers every day who are iterating on a variety of business models. I think in the end we will see a disaggregation of YouTube just like we have seen in many other once complex and costly spaces in tech.

[tinus_hn]

Also manual moderation is pretty expensive, as is dealing with the copyright lawsuits and to top it off the patent licenses for streaming video in the first place.