• That’s a drop in the pond in the grand scheme of things. You just out source that out to rights management companies and absolve yourself from that obligation behind safe harbour. This is basically what they’re doing in this department. They’ve built Content ID for digital finger printing, and then invented an entire market for rights management companies on both sides of the equation.

          On the other hand, 500 hours of video footage got uploaded to YouTube every minute per YouTube in 2022 (pdf warning). 30 minutes of video game content (compresses better), just the 720p variant using avc1 codec is about 443MB of space. Never mind all the other transcodes or higher bitrates. So say 800MB per hour of 720p content; 500 hours of content per minute means 400GB of disk space requirement, per minute; 500TB of disk space per day.

          That’s just video uploaded to YouTube. I don’t even know how much is being watched regularly, but even if we assume at least one view per video, that’s 500TB of bandwidth in and then 500TB of bandwidth out per day.

          Good luck scaling that on public budget.

          • Of course they dont. Not a chance with that much video added every hour. Also everything gotta be automated. And in favor of those who can make the most legal trouble. And thats companies, not the many various smaller IP-owners.

            Just rubs me the wrong way that only Google are finding this business worth it. None of the other companies, even with massive amounts of storage and cdn infrastructure, are able to compete for long.

        • Japan has nicovideo.jp as well. Russia has Yandex Efir (gone through a couple rebrands, Efir was the name in 2020 when we were discussing deals; it was operating under another name prior, and I think it is superseded by dzen). Off to the side I think vK also has a small video delivery presence like how Facebook has videos in their feeds. China has several platforms: Tencent Video (owned by Tencent), Youku as you’ve called out (owned by Alibaba), XiGua (ByteDance), Haokan (Baidu), and then slew of smaller ones like KuaiShou, BiliBili and that video thing WeChat tries to push. None of these are public service operated by the State, by the way. List really goes on… and I’d know, because I’ve worked in the space for almost 12 years now.

          China’s great firewall aside, all these platforms are tiny in comparison, and in the grand scheme of things, and barely have any reach. In general, these regional are all taking a backseat just like Nebula and alike — if creators’ content are hyperlocal/super niche, they might be okay with smaller regional platforms; but if they’re trying to extend their reach and monetization (to ensure they have money to continue producing content), the creators’ presence on these platforms are really just auxiliary to their primary presence on YouTube.

          Getting viewers to these smaller platforms is going to pose a significant chicken or the egg problem — creators aren’t incentivized to be there because lack of viewer, viewers aren’t incentivized to go there because lack of content. Worse yet, I’ve also seen situations where creators are paid for some period of exclusivity and then when the deal lapses they just go straight back to YouTube.

          Real competitors do not exist, and likely will not exist for the foreseeable future. YouTube is the million pound behemoth when everyone else barely registers on the radar.

      • Ads are not just inconvenient but very often annoying and misleading, so I can’t blame anyone for that.

        Micropayment donations might, though. It’s not annoying, not misleading, and there is a considerable amount of people even now that regularly donate/otherwise support their favorite content creators, and this would be even more convenient because it is automatic and the amount depends on how much time did you watch videos.
        And it doesn’t even necessarily depend on cryptocurrencies.

        • The amount of people who would pay is going to be near zero in the grand scheme of things.

          Next time you’re anywhere where you could discretely look at people’s phones, see how many of them run apps with ads. Most apps will offer very cheap IAP to remove ads, but people choose to not pay it. Vast majority of the users have already decided that their time wasted on ads are worth less than whatever tiny monetary cost it would be to remove them. Same thing here: Vast majority of the users have already decided they’re not going to pay to get rid of the ads. This in turn means due to how few people who would be willing to pay, it is not going to be nearly sufficient to keep the infrastructure required up and running, as well as keep the creators compensated for creating the content.