There used to be vimeo and a couple others, but none has survived. I don't like monopolies in general, and YT's war on adblockers is what we get in a monopoly.
For example, I'm running a 3-node, bare-metal cluster with 48 cores, 384 gb of ram, 3tb of redundant storage, and 1tb free egress ... for less than 150 bucks a month.
These same 3 machines, in Azure, would cost ~2k a month, or ~1k with 3yr reserved instances. That's a difference of an entire person's salary and then some.
But "scale!" ... yeah, if you're actually global, your "scale" is pretty consistent with a small lull in the UTC early morning. There's barely any reason to dynamically scale except for extenuating circumstances.
Anyway, without the economy of bare-metal, doing something like YouTube is basically nearly impossible. On bare-metal, you can pretty much get started on a single person's salary and still be able to eat dinner -- while servicing thousands of users.
That's why I wonder why Amazon (AWS), Microsoft (Azure), Meta (Facebook videos and IG) have not entered the game...
- Amazon: Prime Video
- Microsoft: LinkedIn
- Meta: Facebook
Even WordPress.com has their own video streaming service for small sites. The issue comes down to moderation and kicking bad content off. These days, virtually everyone has a video camera in their pocket, but when YouTube came out, it was very rare for someone to be able to create content. Thus they were able to scale up their moderation as the technology became less expensive to consumers.
This would be a problem for any new-comers as well, but one that can be mitigated by using consumer grade LLMs that simply did not exist a few years ago.
Also YouTube is crossing over into that area, for instance, there are pay-per-view movies on YouTube and also YouTube has a service which is very similar to cable TV (and costs about the same.)
As much as people complain about "Smart TVs", Android TV has a very nice interface that blends YouTube with other content, I've seen teenagers have a lot of fun with it.
Serving video at their scale and efficiency is quite advanced and non-trivial. Videos must either be transcoded multiple times and stored, or on the fly.
Now, consider what you're asking for in terms of ad-free. You want to watch videos, but not watch ads. Fair enough. But who pays for the bandwidth? Who pays for the servers and infrastructure for storing the videos?
I can only see four options.
1. You, the watcher.
2. The content creator.
3. The provider (YouTube).
4. A benevolent 3rd party, such as government or nonprofit.
Watching videos with ads is option number one. You are paying by watching ads. I never see ads from youtube, because I pay for premium. That is also option number one.
If you block ads, and do not pay for premium, then you are trying to do number three. You are expecting YouTube to pay all of the costs, but where are they going to get the money to do that? Economically speaking, it's an unsustainable position. Currently, they must make up the Lost revenue from other people who do watch ads. That means, in short, by you not watching ads, you make someone else have to watch more ads.
The approach I considered taking was to provide a pay-for-what-you-use (bandwidth) model. Watching things at a lower resolution costs less, for example.
It may only be a few cents per gig of transfer, but such a simple but fundamental change would have interesting repercussions. For example, content creators would be incentivized to be more concise rather than stretch things out as they currently do. Creators could also then be paid a portion of the transfer fee. So then not just views matters, but actual watch time. The balance of creating meaningful content and not just filler would be an interesting experiment.
Honestly, I would love to explore this option more. I would love to build it!
There is another alternative that I have considered, and that is to allow the users of the site to host the videos themselves. Sort of a torrent-based approach. It's still option number one (or two, depending on the details), but the users provide the infrastructure and bandwidth to one another. A certain part of me likes this approach, but I'm not convinced that it would be a good user experience.
Seems to work well and has a few content creators I follow duplicating their youtube uploads to the platform.
Google leverages their huge datacenters. They're a monopoly precisely because of that.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/Develope...
for just one service. But the costs add up.
(2) It is a hassle to moderate a public service like that. All kinds of Youtube creators claim they are censored (for instance Ukraine warbloggers can't post any combat footage at all or they get demonetized.) Still YouTube struggles with hateful and deceptive content. (Note one area where YouTube competitors exist is pornography, but a huge number of problems come up with that.)
(3) For all the expenses of (1) and (2), YouTube has Google's advertising system behind it. Not just technologically, but in terms of having a large number of advertisers using it. For instance there was a time when almost every pre-roll was an ad for what a jackass my congressman is. Now I am saturated with ads that praise him and visually suggest that Nancy Pelosi has something to do with why congress is so dysfunctional these days (hmmm... the current speaker is... nobody)
A competitor would have to not just build a technological advertising system but also a sales force capable of bringing in enough advertisers. Given that they are making such a huge investment they're going to want to protect that investment by... blocking ad blockers. If you want a different business model that is highly competitive, see
https://news.patreon.com/articles/introducing-patreon-video
That is highly competitive because the barrier to entry isn't high: you need a user management system, a payment gateway and a video CDN and there you go.
I'm sure many wouldn't need to use adblockers in the first place if YT were not bloated. Like they try to shove the "Shorts" thing in your feed. Ads could be displayed around the video (in "Up Next" section) and probably would be even more effective since most people don't maximize videos, so they'd see those ads all the time. It's just that YT has made ads so annoying that people have no option but to use adblockers. On top of that, there are ads inside the videos by the creators (they're part of the video so you can't skip them). Without SponsorBlock, many videos are simply unbearable. Even if I were a paying customer (which I used to be), I'd still use adblockers to block Shorts, video-ads inside videos, and various HTML elements of the page.
Wall Street expects that kind of company to put up better earnings quarter after quarter. At some point they have close to 100% market penetration and can't grow by adding more users. But they can always increase the ad load.
The ads in the videos have gotten out of hand. I feel really bad for one of my favorite YouTubers who, in desperation, started his own brand of pre-workout caffeinated chewing gum which seems like such a dumb idea to me. (I think Singapore has it right about gum)
Shorts is another example of business theater, they have to do something to convince investors they are taking TikTok seriously. Trouble though is that it is very hard to convince people involved in online activity A to try online activity B. Look at the lack of success of Threads... Instagram users just weren't interested. It is why Facebook has had to buy so many competitors because even though Facebook has 1B+ users they just can't convert them to play some new game.
Really though, there is some setting to hide "Shorts" and after all the time they tried to show me pictures of pretty young girls shaking their asses they finally showed me something I will click on which is an older lady in the UK who has foxes coming up to her front door, meets foxes in the street, etc.
OTOH, most junk I've seen on YT were made by "content creators" with SEO skills who would jump on the latest trends to capture views and big bucks.
Tell me about it. If I got a cent for every video that's scripted, voiced and edited by AI - I'd be on the front of next issues Forbes magazine ahaha. I've noticed a large spike of such content in 2021 when several "online gurus" pushed this "strategy for making loads of money on YT without showing your face" who actually make money selling courses than making money from their own Youtube channels.