IN FEBRUARY 2024, without warning, YouTube deleted the account of independent British journalist Robert Inlakesh.
His YouTube page featured dozens of videos, including numerous livestreams documenting Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank. In a decade covering Palestine and Israel, he had captured video of Israeli authorities demolishing Palestinian homes, police harassing Palestinian drivers, and Israeli soldiers shooting at Palestinian civilians and journalists during protests in front of illegal Israeli settlements. In an instant, all of that footage was gone.
In July, YouTube deleted Inlakesh’s private backup account. And in August, Google, YouTube’s parent company, deleted his Google account, including his Gmail and his archive of documents and writings.
The tech giant initially claimed Inlakesh’s account violated YouTube’s community guidelines. Months later, the company justified his account termination by alleging his page contained spam or scam content.
However, when The Intercept inquired further about Inlakesh’s case, nearly two years after his account was deleted, YouTube provided a separate and wholly different explanation for the termination: a connection to an Iranian influence campaign.
A service like youtube is simply hard to pull of with bailing twine and string (like lemmy).
A core part of the service that youtube offers is re-encoding uploads. That requires some beefy hardware to serve even a moderate number of people.
Surely someone’s had the idea of doing the re-encoding client-side before uploading. That seems to me the obvious solution, especially since online creators already generally have beefy hardware for video editing.
It’s a mess. You first run into bandwidth problems on the incoming streams. But you also run into a problem with the device support matrix.
If you say “We’ll support H.264, H.265, AV1, AV2” and “We’ll support 480p, 720p, 1080p, 4k”. Now you’d be asking the clients to do 16 different encodes to upload.
This gets more complicated if you add more streams or supported formats. You also end up needing to coordinate that with the client.
AFAIK, the way youtube currently handles this problem is they have dedicated encoders for live streams and fast encoding. For popular videos they do a second step where they do a more full matrix to optimize viewership.
IDK what youtube does for storage (if anything).
Plus, what happens when you change what you support in the future? You can’t go back to the user and say “hey can you re upload the video again pretty please” because they almost certainly won’t care, or even have it any more. Even a lot of professionals don’t keep an archive of their work.
Vemeo was supposed to be that alternative but instead it’s just art house stuff now.