Youtube Alternatives

What do you think about the future of this industry? Which (if any) providers have a chance to become viable competitors to YouTube?

let's be honest: probably none of them. competing with youtube is prohibitively expensive at this point unless you have something like jeff bezos money behind you. getting your foot in the door is difficult enough because of the costs of video hosting--it'll be another thing entirely to attract people to another platform, especially since it will likely need to have most of what youtube has out of the box in order for people to want to make the switch. that alone kills most competition.

you'll also notice that the few non-youtube video services have specialized. vimeo and dailymotion kinda market themselves not necessarily as youtube alternatives, but as separate services entirely for more esoteric, better produced, better polished content. liveleak has mostly established itself as where all the content unsuitable for youtube due to violence or takedowns goes, and were it not for that they'd probably be irrelevant. this works for them--competing with youtube does not. you're not going to outdo youtube at being youtube, and this is why those three sites have succeeded where others have collapsed: they either never tried, or got out when they realize their endeavors were fruitless and that specialization was the only way forward. any competition that doesn't get tripped up by costs usually fails here.

the one youtube alternative with the most light at the end might be peertube, honestly, for the simple reason that it's decentralized. that model also means it's an ever-changing, never static platform though, and i'm skeptical to say the least that it has the chops to even approach the status of something like vimeo. it's functionally a novelty, and that's all it's likely to be.

A previous related discussion: D.Tube as a viable YouTube Alternative?

I want to think decentralization of all content platform services is where it's at (or at least going to be). I ambitiously include platforms like Spotify, YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, Audible, and even marketplaces like Amazon and eBay into this. With blockchain (or without) we now have ability to serve applications and content through open source and p2p distributed platforms. These industries can be disrupted in a way that benefits society (by lowering cost and increasing payout) and I hope that they will.

Services like peertube (federated content protocol with centralized servers for frontend and webtorrent backend) and dtube (steem blockchain + IPFS) could be the future. Their challenge will be in marketing and sustainability - how can they find a model that quality content creators actually care about?

It's all money.

YouTube is making these moves for the purposes of economic sustainability (initially they needed more good content creators, now they just need to be able to pay them and their bills - which means more ad views however they can get it and demotization of videos and creators that aren't creating enough views in favor of being able to pay out and keep the ones that are). Without another massively funded VC type company (or a crypto ICO or something of the sort), we won't see the type of cash to entice creators. YouTube (and Google) are very good at getting ad revenue, and right now that's the whole model for video, so I don't think it will change in a meaningful way for quite a while.

I'd like to identify what youtube really is, it's not about hosting videos, plenty of other sites can do that. It's about the algorithms used to recommend videos and disseminate them worldwide, it will find the audience for you. That's what makes youtube YouTube. Of course it's also what's been getting the most attention lately, but that's expected, so many people depend on the algorithms, both to make a living and to find that ever-so-precious escape offered by good video.

There is also the utilitarian youtube user, were the site is just a search engine for finding solutions to problems, or specific bits of information. This, I think is going to be easier to replace with a competing platform, then the kind of meandering videos made for pure entertainment so much of youtube is built on. Youtube just does it so well and has such a large library, that it's difficult to compete.

sorry for not actually recommending anything, but I've had these thoughts milling around for a while and felt like this was a good a place as any to dump them.

Edit: personally I've mostly replaced youtube with podcasts and this site, tildes. I already know what podcasts I like and used just a regular search engine if I feel like I'm missing something and tildes does a great job of providing the random bits of information/entertainment so many youtube channels do.

personally, i haven't let go of youtube yet because none of my favorite channels use any alternatives. youtube is just too big

Twitch.tv (Amazon-owned) out-competes youtube for gaming livestreams.

They're basically the only outfit I can see who could potentially do the same with video uploads if they wanted to give it a shot.

They already have playback for past broadcasts (video on demand) and highlights. They already have content creators with hundreds of thousands or millions of followers and a payment structure that works.

For some reason gaming video creators pretty much all use youtube. Either that's purely due to twitch not having edited video uploads be a priority to compete for, or even someone of that size just can't compete.

What youtube has, is more than gaming. They compete off platform-effects. They have to make some really bad business decisions to lose their dominant position.

(that goes for reddit, facebook, and the rest too)

I have seen some youtubers switch over to a service called Vanillo. Vanillo seems small at the moment though.

Given the enormous technical challenge and the fact that most videos are not profitable, I wonder how YouTube can sustain itself.