Ask HN: If you could build better video site than YouTube, how would you do it?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6030163

by DeafTV • 13 years ago

2 8 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

If you could build better video site than YouTube, how would you do it?

zachlatta2• 13 years ago

With a huge engineering team of very smart people. YouTube has some incredible technology powering their backend. Most people seem to underestimate how much work went into it.

DeafTV3• 13 years ago

That is true, but if you could create something that is similar with service that is available via third party. What would you do?

DeafTV3• 13 years ago

What about having Wowza Media Server with Rackspace and Amazon S3?

zachlatta2• 13 years ago

The key word in your question was "better." Sure, building a YouTube alternative is doable. But to make something better than YouTube (disregarding politics) would be an extremely impressive feat.

jmsbrwr• 13 years ago

What do you mean by better? The site is pretty solid technology-wise, but I think we could all do without the comments.

Dwolb• 13 years ago

Mentioned previously in this thread, better is a broad term. From a customer perspective, there are thousands of use cases to look over and examine. Maybe one use case could be worth exploring and then have the concept applied to other use cases.

Let's take the use case of 'instructional video'. My dad doesn't know how to change his brakes, but is functional at using tools. He goes onto Youtube and looks for 'How to change brakes'. He finds a video for what he wants to do with a car that looks similar to his and watches this video. He watches the video 2 or 3 times and then goes out to his car with his laptop. He begins playback until the first step is completed then he tries to complete the first step himself. etc...

The current Youtube implementation could be improved the following way: Youtube knows what car my dad drives and pushes the corresponding 'How to change brakes' video to the top of the search accordingly. My dad clicks the video and the video caches to allow my dad to walk outside, where Wifi is spotty, and watch the video. The video has several break points where my dad knows not to continue to the next step in the 'How to change brakes' video until he's completed the first step. Finally, the system is able to recognize my dad has completed the first step and continues cached video playback to continue to the next step. Finally, Youtube follows up with a video to watch to verify brakes have been changed properly. It might even be useful to show an advertisement of a local brake expert.

Just a thought experiment. There's some vision for making Youtube better and there are a lot of different ways to execute the vision.

gautamnarula• 13 years ago

I'm assuming you mean "better" from a user standpoint, so that's what my comment will address. YouTube is a great site for sharing videos, but there are still some barriers to upload. Forcing you to create account (and now all of this "real name" stuff that Google keeps trying to push) or log in is not an insignificant barrier to uploading.

Imagine a site where the focus was purely on sharing videos as effortlessly as possible. Basically, an imgur for videos. No login or account signup necessary. Drag and drop uploading. Simple user interface. YouTube has the market cornered for videos you want to share with a lot of people, but for a quick-and-dirty project video you just want to share with some friends, or something silly you may not necessarily want associated with an account that you post more serious videos on, there is definitely room for an alternative.

Ask HN: If you could build better video site than YouTube, how would you do it?

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