Well, they picked the wrong org to gamble on strongarming in the case of Blender. Instead of getting them to monetize they've just compelled Blender to move platforms.
Discovery and subscriptions will need to be solved, but that’s not insurmountable (ie RSS). CDNs can be plug and play in front of nginx (if P2P torrent isn't your cup of tea), backend storage can be whatever is cheapest.
It's one thing make a service for few 100 users, it's a different beast to serve millions of users. In case of Online Videos, it is not only extremely difficult, it still remains very expensive. There is literally a handful of companies who can financially and technically pull it off at youtube-scale. After more than 10 years, youtube either makes very little profit or still not profitable.
The more popular the content, the cheaper per unit it'll be to serve (based on bandwidth/transit costs and how they scale, and that you most likely can serve it out of RAM with Varnish, a very inexpensive CDN, or peer to peer), but there will still be a cost, and either the producer or the consumers of that content will need to pay for it.
Only a few companies that can do it centrally. Peer to Peer technology was doing it before youtube existed.
I can give you a list of torrents that are dead and never coming back. Other than takedowns, there's some very old YouTube videos still around.
I don't understand why you are mentioning peer to peer technology? What does that have to do with anything? Youtube is not a cute side project where your viewing experience depending on how many peers your video has. Peertube depends on webtorrent, you literally have to host and seed every single video on your platform and duplicate it multiple times by others. Good luck doing it over petabyte scale. Google does something similar, but popular videos are hosted at users-end point on GGC nodes, distributed over 10,000s of servers all over the world.
The super-seeding / swarming approach developed for the BitTorrent protocol is quite interesting. One original seeder just needs to upload to a few leechers. Then this leechers become seeders themselfs and start to upload to a next layer of leechers and so on. This approach scales exponentially meaning you can cover the whole internet in just a few steps. Further more you can start uploading yourself even before you have completed receiving the file.
E.g. if every node just has 10 uploading connections then you just need 8 steps to cover 100 million = 10^8 peers. Remember the traffic on the original seeder (and every other node) is just 10 uploading connections.
1. YouTube Red so I don't have to see ads
2. Queuing and casting from my phone to my TV.
3. Fast loading and buffer-free streaming (as long as your bandwidth is good enough). Note I'm in Australia - Mixer and Twitch often aren't smooth for me even though I'm on 100 megabit fibre. Sydney or Melbourne PoPs will beat Hong Kong and Singapore every time.
I watch Pycon and LCA videos on YouTube because it's easier than going anywhere else.
I doubt most of them care. Even if some engineers care, I really doubt that the product team does in a circumstance like this.
I think a lot of employees are just not taking a step back to look at the sum of the parts they are helping to build, or maybe they have optimism/trust in their leaders to not fuck everyone over, and others might just draw their line further down the sand (e.g. no Pentagon contracts).
I imagine a brave few are also working to change it for the better from within. I'd definitely choose to work at Apple instead though, Google seems fundamentally creepy these days.
It's all meant to be Logan and Jake Paul and PewDiePie and whatever will drive low-quality mass views so long as the viewer quality isn't so low that they're losing advertisers. At a scale like this, it's just pure statistics.
This is not damage. This is benefit, in terms of getting other content creators in line. The message is clear.
I remember the headlines, but had to go to wikipedia to see why they abandoned ship.
From YouTube's point of view, that's bad, so they need a replacement. It's quantity of views they need, they don't actually have a stake in the success of any one creator.
Perhaps more importantly, the FOSS and tech communities are not a vacuum. Google and YouTube in particular have been getting increasing amounts of negative press recently, and this strongarming of Blender further drives home how far they have gone from the era of "Don't be evil." Additionally, the precedent of changing platforms rather than giving in to Google's pressure has now been set; While there will be no mass exodus, it is easier for entities to follow in Blender's footsteps than it would have been to set the lead, and we may hope that this move turns out well in order to further encourage others with similar inclinations.
This is unlike other content creators, who migh not have the technical skills to try a new platform, or might rely on youtube to get views.