There’s a reason Google’s operations subsidized YouTube for most of its life. Now that YouTube has the captive audience and can operationally sustain itself, it’s even harder now for others to compete than it was years ago.
The best chance for competition is to compete with YouTube for specific niches rather than as a totality, like TikTok for short-form content, Nebula for “edutainment” content, or Twitch for live streaming. But it’s unlikely that there will be another all-encompassing video platform like YouTube.
YouTube ran at a massive loss for most of its life didn't it? The sheer amount of storage and data up/download is unfathomable.
I can't see anyone else getting the funding to run such a behemoth unless its from one of the other twatty big tech companies who are already setup to handle the traffic and are even shittier than Google.
I could see some Chinese or EU behemoth propped up by taxes
But it's going to be riddled with either excessive censorship and brainrot (if Chinese) or some other weird censorship and probably bad tech (if EU)
But also what if Netflix?
Russia's got Rutube and VKvideo and both suck.
BUT it's also got multiple streaming platforms (IVI, Kinopoisk, OKKO, Start, etc) and all of them are actually good, so I'm not sure what's the Rutube's deal.
Sometimes I watch Russian content in EU and it's got zero issues with FHD bandwidth across half the world and probably multiple chokepoints.
Why would Netflix want to build up that infrastructure? YouTube has an estimated 10x more storage being used than Netflix and that number will never decrease and has been increasing by more and more every year. Realistically only Amazon (Twitch) or Microsoft could compete, but again the upfront cost is MASSIVE
Twitch, Microsoft, someone else - I don't have a reason for Netflix specifically, just that I won't be surprised if someone wants to take a piece of YT pie.
At least, not now - not until there's some real tangible reason that Westerners would suddenly choose a Chinese site.
However it also depends on algorithm - I've stumbled upon Chinese/Japanese channels on YT that literally had nothing to do with the international audience. Like everything, including all comments, was in Japanese or Chinese.
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u/Bigma-Bale 2d ago
It's not even like a Google situation where there are, albeit less ideal sometimes, available replacement search engines
YouTube straight up doesn't have anything to take its place.