The sooner someone disrupts youtube, the better the world will be.
P2P is not the answer. It may work for the 1% (popular videos), but for the 99% it does not provide a viable alternative for on-demand content... I don't want to wait 5 hours for a 3 year old how-to video to stream from a single seed with limited upload capacity :(.
E.g. Look at torrents. Popular ones are readily available, but obscure or old torrents will be lucky to have a single seed.
In a P2P world, if you're uploading a long tail video of your cat that only your family will watch, maybe it's up to you to "seed that torrent" - or more realistically, keep your machine running so that your peer can serve the content to theirs. It's the move from desktops to mobile and laptop devices that run only sporadically that is the real problem for P2P.
You can still self-host your own videos, but then it's hard to monetize them to pay for the bandwidth. Remember that this is a "two sided market": you have to bring viewers and video producers to it.
And the commercials are blocked successfully by AdBlock.
That seems like oversimplifying matters. The way Google automatically identifies infringing content is very much a technological issue, as well as the vast problems that it causes when it's wrong.
Because even if you assume DMCA is sufficient, at this scale what is the alternative? The content owners would essentially have to implement their own content ID like system to find infringing content (which they already do to some extent), but rather than having hundreds of different stakeholders implement a hundred different systems (or the same system hundreds of times) externally, it's simply more efficient to centralize it at the point where the content is stored. Not to mention that the more likely outcome would be a massive lawsuit rather than content creators bothering to implement this system on their own.
Also, if YouTube wants to make money, let's face it, they need content people really want, which is what the big content creators own. Pretty sure they have this content ID system to keep those folks happy.
The issues are still less technical and more legal or business-related.
There's a big difference between the claim that content owners would do something similar anyway to provide a basis for DMCA takedown notices and that it is more efficient for Google to do it for them and the claim that it is legally mandatory for Google to do it.
> Also, if YouTube wants to make money, let's face it, they need content people really want, which is what the big content creators own. Pretty sure they have this content ID system to keep those folks happy.
There's also a big difference between the claim that it is beneficial to YouTube in terms of positive relations with people it wants to do business with and the claim that it is legally mandatory for them to do it.
Good luck shipping something that doesn't work with YouTube. I'd say their position of power is greater than Netflix.
It is almost like another big company who refused, for years, to implement a PDF export function into their flagship word-processor product.
At some point, hosting video yourself on an aws instance will be feasible. Until then, we're probably stuck with YouTube.
TPB was floating this idea without funding almost a decade ago. it didn't take off because Cohen's Bittorrent Sync was implied to be open, and the project died in anticipation of the better (standard/trusted) technology.