But no big company has ever attempted to compete - why?
No YouTube competitor from Microsoft, Apple, Spotify, Amazon, Netflix or Twitter.
YouTube seems the most easily disrupted, and yet none of the big guys are even trying to compete. Why is this?
It seems clear that given choices, many YouTube creators would happily publish to another platform.
It's not like competing with facebook, which is doomed to fail because the value is in the network - all that's needed is the resources to put together the infrastructure, advertise it and reward the content creators. That's well out of the reach of most smaller companies, but Apple, Microsoft or Amazon could easily throw $20billion at it and not even notice the money was gone.
The puzzling thing is that none of them have even tried.
Anyone got any idea why none of the big guys are raising a finger to take what YouTube's got?
Anyway, Google has demonstrated the model is a money-fire, even if you operate the largest ad network on the planet. Videos are increasingly expensive to vend, particularly as video quality expectations only get higher, digital rights management is a unending nightmare and moderating content like that is a non-trivial proposition too, particularly to keep advertisers happy. Vimeo has demonstrated this too, as revealed by the service charges they slap on uploaders for popular videos. For google, however, youtube is a loss leader, I guess, as it builds out their ecosystem, and also it has clear market dominance, which is easy to lose and difficult to acquire later if you want it.
So, in short, consider what the purpose of a tube site today is: 1) Eyeballs on ads, and, 2) A community, to facilitate point 1. It's clear why companies don't rush to this.
I would say that maybe the only outstanding opportunity is some substack-like setup where people directly pay for user-made content and hosting costs are embedded in there? Google is starting to tap this market as well, with channel memberships, early video access and rewards, and also through superchats in livestreams, so maybe there's not even an opportunity there.
-edit- In fact, thinking it over, Microsoft did actually throw their hat in the game with Mixer, which was an expensive failure. This is actually a great example of the difficulty in moving into a dominated market. Unless you can burn money for years (mixer) to maybe make it, or outclass the competition technologically and find a new paradigm (twitch, tik-tok), it's very hard to get in there. Look at how hard Epic Games have been trying to unseat Steam as a dominant sales platform; it's been years and they have spent truckloads of cash on game studios and giveaways and they're still not an equal player. Mixer agreed to transfer their content to Facebook's streaming service in the end.
Building a YouTube clone would be expensive for Microsoft and they probably don’t believe they can make money at it.
So far as competition the real competition could be for advertisers which would probably make things worse for creators.