First, there are competitors like Vimeo as direct competitor, and Twitch for live streaming.
Second, there are several hurdles for competition with Youtube:
- Video streaming consume massive amounts of bandwidth, which is quite expensive.
- Badly written legislation favors established systems that had time and money to develop the necessary mecanisms to filter the content , to comply with things like DMCA and current EU shitty legislation about copyright protection. The latter is really encumbering as it puts the responsability on the content provider, not the uploader, so it’s a costly proposition to make a public platform for videos.
- You compete with a player that has the money to put the app on every cellphone, lowering the cost of entry, a bit like microsoft with windows in the 90’s - 00’s.
- People expects you to have a perfect solution; there is little tolerance for bugs given the maturity of YT platform. Oh sure, they complain about the algorithm, but there are much, much worse alternatives.
All of this costs money and certainly prevents “grassroot” as the environment has changes a lot since youtube started.
As for the first question… well: My guess is people like the platform enough: it is a mature product and works quite decently, and most importantly, it was working fine a year or two ago. People don’t understand why it stopped working, and Google is not very forthcoming with answers.
