this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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There's a problem when they have a sort of diagonal integration into the industry, as they're kind of pulling up the ropes from competition while monetizing the product. It reeks of looming antitrust.
If I want to distribute billions of videos to billions of people on my own site, that'd be great, but my options are basically to pay Google, Amazon, or Microsoft for help.
I don't understand this comment at all. Hosting your own video is actually super easy. HTML5 video is as simple as HTML5 images. It's just the cost factor.
You can do it all without the cloud as well, you just have to actually go buy the servers or rent them from traditional virtual private server hosts. Not everyone has gone to the cloud.
Yes please recreate YouTube with html5 And make sure a billion users can access billions of videos at all times with your static HTML site.
You said on your own site. The fact that YouTube exists and makes that easier isn't the argument against YouTube you think it is...
Nothing about that tag requires the site to be static either, but whatever.
I'm not going to converse with you further because you do not know what you're talking about 👍
As a professional software engineer with a background in scalable web infrastructure...
The video player is done for you by the browser (unless you insist on dressing it up). Hosting a video is the same as hosting any file. If you've already got a website that can host content for billions, there's not a major problem other than storage and bandwidth costs.
You can say I don't know what I'm talking about until the cows come home, but all you've done is make completely unsubstantiated claims about how you can't possibly do this yourself, meanwhile I can say for a fact plenty of sites host their own video just fine.
Hosting billions of videos "on your own site" would be a bit silly though.
Yes tell me more about load balancing
It is very clear you are quite green in this field.
🤦♂️
What's your HTML5 plan for when your site goes down because one of the videos a user uploads to your site goes viral and is receiving ~10,000 requests every second across 6 continents?
That's a trick (and a completely different) question from:
If you assuming this is a load spike well above your maximum throughput, you just fall over. That's the reason the cloud took off in the first place; if you do it the old fashioned way, you can get overwhelmed and have no recourse but to fall over because you can't provision servers fast enough.
If this is a "normal" occurrence, you're probably talking about round-robin'd DNS distributing to (hopefully) the nearest data center where you have a load balancer, then that could hit another layer of load balancing on the machine or directly go to servers on the machine depending on how you have things setup, then that could hit several different designs of web server with their own quirks (asyncio -- non-preemptive multitasking --, threaded -- preemptive multitasking --, single threaded, or some mix thereof depending on your design -- pros and cons to all of them).
Those could do several things depending on how fast your data centers become consistent WRT uploaded videos. We'll just assume you already have a copy of the video in each regional data center. You fetch from there and serve the file, like any other file.
... or maybe you get really fancy and use WebRTC to get the files from clients already watching the video.
But please, add another surprise requirement and continue to strawman.
EDIT: Oh neat, found out after the fact PeerTube actually does that WebRTC trick https://docs.joinpeertube.org/contribute/architecture#the-peertube-player :)
oh, but, quoting you here
🙄
Ok I'm done conversing with you for real now I have a weekend to go have, cheers. Good luck with your budding CS career and your HTML5.
Whatever dude...
🥂
I'm happy to talk about antitrust and breaking up conglomerates. But that needs to be a big conversation across many industries not just "Google bad, grrr".
If you're referencing WEI, btw, it is one of the topics people have been most misled about. Can link you to my Mastodon thread where I break down all the misunderstanding if you'd like
There's no overarching anti-trust conversation to be had because there's currently no anti-trust cases, if there ever will be. The comments under each individual instance of it being required is the "big conversation". As a content aggregation site (mainly news) the only place it could realistically occur is under some wishful thinking self-post nobody would care about.
I also saw people pine for trust busting just the other day under some Amazon article, there's simply nowhere else to post about it at the moment.
I meant to say that I'm much more inclined to have conversations with people about the need for stricter antitrust laws and enforcement than I am about a single subsidiary of a multinational corp. protecting their revenue stream
It's all about ads/ad money/data, it's heavily bleeding into a single issue. It's not like some giant manufacturing company doing shady things with their cars and air conditioners, all the subsidiaries are interlinked. You could say WEI is just a Chrome thing, Google is just their search engine, AdWords is just an ad service etc, but they're all part of the data to ads to sales pipeline.
And as long as users expect free content there will be a continued need to monetize their usage. That's not inherently bad.
Also, WEI is about so so so much more than ad blockers and DRM. Like, so much more. And the spec has nothing to do with Chrome/Google. They are just the first implementers of both sides of equation (browser feature + attester) and only works on Android right now because attestation comes from the OS. They did it for Google Play Services. Nothing else.
So basically they're using their monopoly to force through changes in internet standards? Sounds like the EU will be paying a visit soon.
My dude, do you even understand the technical details of WEI or are you regurgitating what the Internet has told you? Have you read the spec? They are not forcing anything. Nobody has to opt in. It's not even available outside of Android and right now it's only being used for Google's own products (Google Play Services specifically)
Please don't talk like you know what the deal is when you do obviously don't
This is exactly what they did with .webp
Ah yes, I remember that time when the Internet stopped allowing gifs, jpgs, and pngs. Now Firefox crashes whenever it tries to load an image other than a webp because Google made them /s