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Comment by throwaway316943 | Hacker News Reader

YouTube is the most accessible place for content like this. They may be running the site into the ground lately but the initial implementation of a site that allows easy uploading, sharing and discovery of video content still has a lot of merit and is miles beyond anything else if only for the fact that it has the largest market share.

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This biggest problem any competitor faces is cost. YouTube has a monopoly on this space, unfortunately.

The only alternative would be some kind of distributed torrent index. But would need to work in a browser to be accessible to people. So, unless browsers add first class support for this, this means a web site with ads, probably and then you have the same problems again.

There's no way the average content creator would seed videos indefinitely. The whole point of a video hosting service is to not host it yourself.

I doubt this. People are willing to reupload videos that they like, so why wouldn't they seed? for example this video has been reuploaded quite a few times because people like it so much: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mhu-EA1ruNk

The whole point of a video hosting service is to act as an easy directory for finding videos you like. The fact that the same service happens to host the videos in this case is inconsequential.

Reuploading is just a single shot upload of a few gigabytes.

Continual seeding to millions of peers is not.

Webtorrent is a thing so it could be done.

PeerTube? LBRY?

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