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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

YouTube seems like one of the most easily disrupted services - not by small fry, but by the big guys.

If Apple made a YouTube-alike or Microsoft, they would likely find the YT creators are champing at the bit to get onto their platform.

Has there ever been a real go at YouTube by a company with significant resources?

Yes I am aware of Nebula but it is not a serious competitor to YouTube. I say that because I tried to use it on PlayStation - which is where I watch all my YouTube and couldn't, which means Nebula is not a serious competitor. Any serious competitor must be available on all the most popular media consumption platforms, and it must not require signup/signin to start watching - that's the baseline set by YouTube.

Even NetFlix - why have they not created a new service for user created content?

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Probably because they would have to navigate the same lawsuits and agree to the same kind of automated take-down system to the satisfaction of the largest rights-holders (Sony, Warner Bros, Disney etc)

See this comment [0] in this thread, the current incarnation of youtube is the result of millions spent in legal fees. What's the incentive to do it all over again with little hope of success? IIRC YouTube wasn't profitable until very recently.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32160488

I don't agree that the big companies would be deterred by that.

The CEO's of those huge companies aren't likely to be even interested in legal matters unless it's the DOJ calling about anti monopoly practices - that's what they pay their legal counsel for.

I don't think they'd give the slightest rats about fighting out the content ownership issues, especially since YouTube has already shown that it can be done.

>> What's the incentive to do it all over again with little hope of success?

Why "little hope of success"? No-one at that level has even tried.

It's completely different from trying to take on facebook, in which you need to build the network before the whole thing works. With user created content they can start at any size.

In fact, pre-Google YouTube has very loose standards with regard to copyright. Most of the content was blatant piracy, a bit like "tube" porn sites today (YouTube also had porn btw). But it was a small company, and rightsholders didn't really care.

The minute it was bought by Google and their deep pockets, it was lawsuit after lawsuit.

First mover. No other service will ever get the opportunity to amass an 87-quadrillion-video catalog to compete with YouTube's.

They don't need the entire catalogue.

They just need to promise to fix the problems that content creators like Fran are unhappy about. Alot of YouTube content creators are very unhappy but they have no choices offered to them.

Bring over some of the biggest YouTubers by buying them - such as Linus Tech Tips.

Offer better terms than YouTube does for monetization to the long tail of content creators.

Money talks, and those big companies have more money than you can fit in a phonebooth.

Spotify did something similar when it paid big money for the Joe Rogan podcast.

LTT tried to launch their own video hosting platform called Floatplane, doesn’t seem to have taken off so far.

Please not apple, netflix - cant trust bay area tech with important things anymore

It's called rumble.

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