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Comment by KMnO4 | Hacker News Reader

Video hosting is actually a lot harder than it seems.

- For starters, you need the server space to host it. Videos can be large -- a 10 minute 4k video can be nearly 5gb in size.

- Then you need to the CPU to transcode it to various formats and bitrates (Youtube keeps more than 30 different formats sometimes)

- Then you need to bandwidth to actually serve all that data. Ideally you have servers geolocated close to the user.

As someone with a slow internet connection, I generally despise self hosted videos. If your video won't load because I don't have a >100mbit connection, I will likely leave.

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This isn't really relevant to OP. There are lots of sites that host video already.. YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, etc.

A successful discovery platform would allow content creators to publish to any platform they want (or their own site), and still maintain their viewership.

> As someone with a slow internet connection, I generally despise self hosted videos.

To this I would say that at this point, storage and CDNs are becoming a commodity, and "self hosted" does not have to mean slow. I can build and host my own site on a home server while still serving videos from GCP CDN. Now I have similar to performance to YouTube without the YouTube.

Making mountains out of mole hills, IMHO. Streaming at large scale isn't hard, you just gotta do it. Certainly wasnt the hardest problem I've worked on. All of this is now easy as ever to solve, AWS can transcode, you don't even need to know anything about codec anymore.

Source: used to manage some of the largest adult tube sites.

Your comment seems to make the assumption that this is a technical problem. You're right that it'd be possible to make a YouTube site by oneself. If one did it with GCP they could be using the exact same hardware and very similar software as YouTube.

However, the real problem the parent talks about is financial. YouTube gets all this hosting at cost for Google. A YouTube competitor has to pay the AWS, GCP, etc. markups. They'd also have significantly less advertising income than Google. Plus, many of the professional content creators wouldn't even consider a platform that doesn't pay out ad revenue.

That's the internet, it's just computers connected together and each computer belongs to someone. The more you have, the more traffic you have. The only way I can see this working is if the internet or parts of the internet become a public asset, a national cloud (like roads etc) paid by income taxes. Your videos would be on this public storage, common services would work like AWS services etc. It will be hard since this means additional taxes but at least the government will not be interested in competition (in theory).

Valid point, without money to burn it's not possible in any market.

>Videos can be large -- a 10 minute 4k video can be nearly 5gb in size.

Not on YouTube, with the way YouTube compresses video it's usually somewhere around 10 gigabytes for an hour of 4k@60 video.

>Then you need to bandwidth to actually serve all that data. Ideally you have servers geolocated close to the user.

I don't see any serious benefits from decreased latency, if we are talking about video streaming.

Most users won't watch the video, if they need to wait for too long before it begins.

Even if user is on the other side of the planet latency is somewhere near 500ms. It isn't that much.

Latency isn't important for video streaming, peering is.

The goal is not necessarily to make self hosting easier. The goal is that if you're able to self-host than you could benefit from this recommendation platform by being discoverable. It's your hassle to be viewable the recommendation platform doesn't host anything.

And also text websites crash frequently when they go viral, it's going to be a bigger challenge for people to scale video going from thousands to views a day on their niche to a million if they make something that spreads.

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