Comment by visakanv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by visakanv | Hacker News Reader

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> "Let me break it down: YouTube and other video hosting sites have made it easy to pirate stuff on the web (which is where piracy started), but they shouldn’t be positioned as some revolutionary business. It’s a silly, little business that anyone could setup in a week. The fact that folks are talking about them being bought for some large amount of money by Newscorp is commical. They are a glorified FTP site with TAGS people! I could set this up in a weekend with two kids in high-school and a couple of cases of Red Bull. In fact, the first two programmers to email me with a decent resume I’ll back you guys to build a YouTube compeititor–provided you can build it in under five days."

I guess the lesson here, as with all sorts of criticisms of early products– Instagram, the first iPhone, and even the Internet itself– is that it's easy to underestimate how much things can change, and how powerful a large audience can be. I'm sure I'm not being nuanced enough there (because sites with large audiences don't always keep them– Digg, MySpace).

Would love to hear some smart thoughts about what we all ought to learn from this sort of thing, so that we (hopefully) don't keep making the same prediction errors over and over again!

Or is it simply inescapable?

It's easy to forget that things change, and change tends to be exponential. What YouTube did was remove the hassle and fiction in posting videos online. It used to take a lot of effort, and many people who didn't know enough didn't realize the complexities involved.

The author here calls youtube an ftp site, and in doing so ignores what set youtube apart. Youtube automatically transcoded videos, it played videos in your browser inline with other content, and it was free. All you had to do was make your video small enough to upload and YouTube did the rest. You didn't have to worry about codecs, or hosting, or bandwidth Nichols, or domain registration, or any of that. Previously if you wanted to host a video online you had to optimize the encoding, pay for bandwidth, and worry about compatibility depending on encoding. Then your video would be viewed by a browser plugin, usually as a bare video.

Plus there was a catch-22, if your video got too popular it would cost a ton of money to host. Youtube got rid of all that hassle, and in so doing naturally started to acquire content and users. Once the critical mass network effect kicked in then youtube became the default place to view and post any and all video content. From there it should have been obvious to anyone paying sufficient attention that the quality would only go up, the costs of bandwidth and servers would only go down and with a sufficient number of viewers that some monetization strategy or another was likely to be effective.

People made similar mistakes about tons of new technologies, the commonality is often assuming that the launch state is the end state, and not square one of a massive acceleration in sophistication, features, etc.

> The author here calls youtube an ftp site, and in doing so ignores what set youtube apart.

Great point. Very often people when people don't understand a business, or dislike it, it seems that they reduce it to its superficial components. Eg "Uber is just private taxis", "Amazon is just an online bookseller", "Twitter is just a microblogging service".

There's usually something more to it than meets the eye, if you're willing to look.

I remember people said[1] we could do the same as Dropbox by "getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs .." when the drew houston posted on HN. Not that we couldn't, just that not every user is capable to. So, look at where Dropbox is now.

[1] : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

The other key thing with YouTube was that in the early days it delivered the video fast. There was no waiting or delay while it buffered. That wasn't the case with other video sites of the era.

Very true. Back then there were a ton of options for video. Hosted mpegs, avis, real video, quicktime, divx, etc. Most of the viral videos of the day were short enough to be downloaded in their entirety. Streaming video was usually extremely low quality with frequent interruptions for buffering. Youtube got rid of most of those problems and improved the situation with buffering by a huge margin.

>It used to take a lot of effort, and many people who didn't know enough didn't realize the complexities involved.

It's funny how fast we forget this. Compare video game videos today to 10 years ago. Someone would make a video, spend five hours uploading it via ftp to a niche video hosting website, link me to that website from a separate forum for the game, then I'd spend 40 minutes downloading a video I'd watch twice. It's downright primitive to what we have today. And it was only a decade ago.

Well, Calacanis is much more successful than me so I'm inclinded to think that:

1. Yes, he made the wrong call on Youtube. 2. The habit of making wrong (but still reasonable) calls might be a good one.

My learning from this:

1. Form a view based on the best facts and analysis available at the time. 2. Act on that view. Share it. Be confident. 3. Be ready to change your mind and not worry about having been wrong.

Success is about taking enough good gambles that some pay off. Most people don't let themselves take good gambles, and the value of a few paying off more than pays for a few that don't. If it's not a gamble at all everybody will be doing it.

And then people made the same "glorified ftp site" and "could make it in a weekend" comments about Dropbox.

Video technology is one of the few deep technology plays in mass market web - sheer number of protocols and standards, securing digital video, streaming video using non QOS means catering to each and every device and bandwidth, content personalisation, ad targeting all are problems of a magnitude bigger than the mundane ones you encounter on transactional/social web. Youtube has become the golden standard of video streaming - and without Google technology and money - this would not have been possible.

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