
Using Python helped YouTube ship features faster than Google Video - swyx
https://books.google.com/books?id=eulODwAAQBAJ&lpg=PA136&dq=google%20video%20vs%20youtube%20python%20story&pg=PA136#v=onepage&q=google%20video%20vs%20youtube%20python%20story&f=false
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nitwit005
As much as I want to credit python, I doubt that was the cause. It's typically
far easier to ship a new feature at a small company, because there's no
bureaucracy, no wait for QA, no need to translate text into 20 languages, etc.

~~~
hyperpallium
Yes. Perhaps also brilliant engineers don't want to hack together something
half-assed that barely works, but does provide the feature.

I've always liked that youtube uses PHP - much derided, but its declarative
"templating" is the easiest, simplest, most direct way to generate html. Maybe
that was a factor too.

But I think the youtube engineers might have a more accurate opinion on why
they were quicker, than the google video engineers.

~~~
grzm
> _but its declarative "templating"_

Do you have any insight onto how much of the templating aspect of PHP is used
at Youtube? I know of some large PHP installations where PHP is used as a
general programming language that does produce web pages, but the templating
aspect of PHP is pretty much minimal, and other engines actually produce the
final output.

~~~
DonHopkins
For a so-called templating language, PHP sure falls short, and thus has a
plethora of ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementations of
half of many other templating languages implemented in it.

[https://www.smarty.net/](https://www.smarty.net/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Templates](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Templates)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule)

~~~
codedokode
Smarty is something from 15 years ago. Nowadays people use Twig which is
inspired by Python's Jinja template engine and has similar syntax.

~~~
DonHopkins
Yet Python has never claimed to be a templating language itself, let alone
"the easiest, simplest, most direct way to generate html".

My point is that PHP pretends to be a templating language, then falls flat on
its face, so people end up implementing much worse (Smarty, MediaWiki) or
sometimes even better (Twig) templating languages on top of it.

In other words, it's simply not true that PHP's "declarative "templating" is
the easiest, simplest, most direct way to generate html", or there wouldn't be
a need for Smarty, the MediaWiki abomination (which is 17 years old but still
widely used on 29 million pages), or Twig.

I'd say "to hack together something half-assed that barely works, but does
provide the feature" perfectly describes the PHP development process itself.

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dbspin
As someone who was creating a reasonably popular 'video podcast' back then, I
have a different perspective...

Uploading to Google video was incredibly slow relative to Youtube. During the
period of the 'battle' between the two services, Youtube allowed only very
short videos - excluding most useful content, but discouraging piracy (except
for very laborious multi part uploads). G'Video on the other hand allowed
uploading of essentially any length, although at much lower resolution

But it was incredibly laborious, as uploads took hours - and were liable to
fail without warning (at least uploading from Europe). I recall there was also
an emphasis on adding lots of metadata etc, another barrier to uploading.

The social elements of youtube - perhaps in hindsight addicting rather than
useful, are rightfully acknowledged. Whats less well remembered is the sheer
clunkiness of using Google Video. The service looked and responded much more
like a corporate intranet than a website. Still, I - and lots of other
'vidcasters' at the time were sad to see it go.

Here's a perspective from the time - from a blogpost I wrote about different
video services in 2006 ([https://garethstack.com/2006/07/24/the-unavoidable-
future-of...](https://garethstack.com/2006/07/24/the-unavoidable-future-of-
entertainment/))...

"While sites like Youtube and Guba, may or may not have a future primarily as
redistributors of broadcast content, they’ve done little to foster the
creation of original work. In fact, by restricting the length and size of
files which can be uploaded (ostensibly to reduce copyright infringement),
YouTube have diminished their chances of becoming a hotbed of original
content. Google video, although bravely eschewing any restrictions on the
length of uploaded content (whilst foolishly restricting video quality to an
extremely low bit rate), does little to foster the community creation or
pooling of talent needed to inspire the development of original shows and
films. Note, it’s far from clear that it was ever Google’s intention to become
a generator of new IP, so Google Video shouldn’t necessarily be seen as a
failure"

~~~
justonepost
Yeah, absolutely. I remember that being a big thing as to what Google Video
said when they bought youtube. The immediacy of the upload was a huge factor
in YouTube's success. It's not hard to imagine that YouTube won via better PM.
That often happens.

------
bsder
YouTube was also burning money for bandwidth like nobody's business. I suspect
that Google Video tracked and limited bandwidth.

If Google hadn't bought them, YouTube were headed straight for bankruptcy.
People forget that the YouTube deal was a big time boardroom back scratch
between Google and the VC's.

The worst part is that Google subsidizing YouTube has set back a real
monetization of video on the web.

~~~
nandwidth
I disagree with that. I think the web is monetizing video at an appropriate
rate, considering most video itself is essentially worthless.

That video content is costly to produce, and kills bandwidth indiscriminately,
does not mean video is valuable. Just because there’s a high bar for video to
exist, doesn’t mean that cost should get passed on to consumers.

Most video is non-essential, and consumers get to be picky about where their
disposable income goes. Video needs to be redeeming to the viewer, whatever
their tastes may be, and whose fault is it that the surplus of junk content
exists?

~~~
bsder
> I think the web is monetizing video at an appropriate rate, considering most
> video itself is essentially worthless.

Um, I think you are confusing cause and effect.

Isn't worthless video exactly the problem that subsidizing video delivery
_caused_?

If you have to pay even a _penny_ to put your video on the web, most video
disappears and suddenly the quality skyrockets.

------
firefoxd
That's the power of scripting languages. You don't focus on the language but
on solving the problem.

unrelated: the ui is impossible to navigate on mobile.

~~~
vonseel
And UI has been unusable on Google Books forever!

~~~
SomewhatLikely
Must be coded in C++.

------
jakeogh
I remember when Google announced video.google.com was closing, and then they
backtracked and said it wasn't. And then they closed it. I have
video.google.com posts that I would like to migrate, but it's gone.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H542nLTTbu0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H542nLTTbu0)

------
swyx
No affiliation at all to the author but if you want to read more he's
@driscollis on twitter and the book is at [https://www.packtpub.com/web-
development/python-interviews](https://www.packtpub.com/web-
development/python-interviews)

also I first heard this story on the Talk Python podcast
[https://talkpython.fm/episodes/show/156/python-history-
and-p...](https://talkpython.fm/episodes/show/156/python-history-and-
perspectives)

Of course its not the full story but it is an interesting comment and from a
firsthand source. That's all I know, I dont have a dog in this fight :)

------
tjoff
Yeah, no. That is obviously not why, and it is quite telling that the guy
being interviewed still, after the purchase, hasn't got the slightest clue as
to why (or doesn't want to admit it).

It is disheartening to see this on the front page with so little substance.

------
carlsborg
Interviewee closely involved with the YouTube acquisition: “competitive
advantage was python.”

Commenters I’m this thread: “nah it wasn’t python.”

------
peoplewindow
I worked at Google during that period. It's not quite as simple as "Python >
C++" although yes, for sure, you're going to produce new UI features at a far
faster rate working in a high level language like Python than working with
C++. Absolutely that was a factor. I don't think Google Video had hundreds of
developers vs 20 though. That doesn't sound right to me.

The real reasons YouTube won were strategic, not purely a function of
developer speed.

In particular YouTube focused a lot on social / discovery features and
prioritised them, at a time when the importance of social wasn't so obvious
and Google in particular was very bad at anything with a social dimension. So
Google Video had super scalable backends, great search etc, but it wasn't very
good at user profiles, commenting, channels, subscribers, discovery, content
surfacing and so on. Whereas YouTube excelled at these things and was good at
encouraging people to upload whatever random vids they created even if
apparently worthless.

Google in contrast was less certain that free user generated content would
ever be a big deal, and right from day one saw Google Video primarily as a
marketplace. It focused much more on acquiring content rights from
professional producers as a result. Even YouTube wasn't really sure UGC+ads
was going to turn into a real business which is why they had a lax approach to
video piracy for so long. Early YouTube traffic was to some extent driven by
piracy of professional content, a problem that only got wiped out once Google
acquired them and build content id. Even when comments were eventually added,
it was a tiny box to the side of the video which took up the bulk of the web
page, and there was an admonition "Please make sure your comments are useful
and informative" \- very Google. YouTube on the other hand made the video less
prominent and what users were saying about it much more so.

Social features are a great use case for Python because you need to churn them
out and iterate very fast, the cost of correctness bugs is very low, and their
performance complexity is not very high, so that's the sweet spot for a
scripting language. On the other hand around the time YouTube were acquired
they struggling tremendously with the scaling aspects of their operation and
large chunks of the site had to be quickly switched to C++. YouTube when I
left was still a mix of Python and C++, with the C++ code handling things like
search, transcoding, thumbnail serving, anti-spam, content id, video serving
and so on. All the heavy lifting. Python was left handling the main site UI,
admin tooling and not much else.

There were also some technical mis-steps by the Google Video team. YouTube
relied entirely on Flash from day one. For whatever reason the GV team were
far more reluctant to hitch themselves to the Flash plugin and for example
they only enabled video upload via a web form about a year after YouTube
entered beta, before that you had to use a desktop app to do it. They also
wrote their own video playing plugin but it wasn't as good as Flash and they
eventually scrapped it. Their paid for pro content also required a dedicated
video player app. YouTube being a small startup couldn't get content deals as
it was too tiny for the producers to deal with, so they just focused 100% on
UGC and features like embedding, which acted as a giant advert for their
service.

More insights here:

[https://googlesystem.blogspot.ch/2006/08/why-is-youtube-
more...](https://googlesystem.blogspot.ch/2006/08/why-is-youtube-more-popular-
than.html#gsc.tab=0)

~~~
bb88
You say:

> Social features are a great use case for Python

And then say:

> On the other hand around the time YouTube were acquired they struggling
> tremendously with the scaling aspects of their operation and large chunks of
> the site had to be quickly switched to C++.

I fail to see how python failed youtube here.

You use the right tools for the job. And the tools that got you 10e1 views per
day may not be the tools that get you to 10e10 views per day.

I once worked at a place that supposedly "engineered" their backend to handle
1,000,000 connections at once. Only everything fell over at 10,000 connections
in production, and they struggled for two years to get to 100,000 connections.

The point is, you don't know what you don't know, and you won't know the pain
points are until you hit them. And the more groundbreaking your service (in
this case internet video distribution), the chance of your architecture being
100% correct from the start is zero.

------
anabis
I heard an anecdote where the actual first movers on a new video feature was
porn sites. They were smaller still, and probably had a more tolerant
audience.

~~~
swyx
I feel like entertainment (gaming, porn, even say tourism for spaceflight) has
always punched above its weight in leading technology. Really makes you think
about whether we are more motivated to use our intelligence/resources to solve
hard problems or to please ourselves.

------
Eridrus
And Google still writes backends in C++ in 2018.

~~~
brrrrr
I'd imagine that any company building its own hardware will continue to
develop at least _some_ code in C++ for another 25 years.

