

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

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

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gautamnarula
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.

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zachlatta
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.

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

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zachlatta
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.

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DeafTV
Okay, I apologize for misuse of better. What service would you use to build an
alternative of YouTube, but yet have advertising features like Hulu?

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

