this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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Amazon doesn't want to start a division that's essentially guaranteed to be unprofitable for the foreseeable future
I'm gonna have to ask for a source on that...
I work for Amazon corporate. I can emphatically agree that right now, and for the past few post-COVID years, Amazon's only obsession is near term quarterly profits for stakeholders by any means necessary. To hell with long term investments. They are slowly sabotaging themselves internally with a lot of unpopular and frankly idiotic and nonsensical decisions that will ultimately result in cascading failure after failure. The enshittification continues.
If you want me to prove a negative, I can't do that.
Youtube isn't profitable. Youtube has never been profitable. Frankly that's incredibly unlikely to change. Amazon isn't going to try to break into a space that is unprofitable, would require a monumental effort to actually draw creators (since just offering big creators money clearly didn't work, see mixer or anyone else), and requires astronomical amounts of data storage even for AWS. They're especially not going to do that when they just spent the last however many years watching multiple people do a much smaller task, take on twitch (again, mixer and the like), with zero success.
Would I love to see a not completely awful proper alternative to Youtube? Yes. It's that going to come from Amazon? No. And no, peertube isn't the answer either, and won't be unless there's an easy path to monetization for existing creators and data storage magically becomes free
Not to mention, Amazon already owns multiple online video services with Prime Video and Twitch. The intersection of those two already cover a bunch of those bases, so you're talking about standing up an entirely new unprofitable service that needs it's own monolithic infrastructure and will end up competing with your own services, in order to try to take a third slice away from YouTube.
It's just no where near worth it. If you think Amazon has any business competing with YouTube, you don't understand A) how the market works B) how much of a technical undertaking that is C) how much lift it would take to get a reasonable number of creators to keep the platform active D) how financially unviable the product is. Even one of those on its own would be a serious dissuasion from doing so, but there are many reasons not to do this.
Amazon already has an ad sales division through FreeVee. They also already have the storage infrastructure. It would probably be a good fit.
I think you're underestimating the sheer amount of infrastructure that would be needed for a proper youtube competitor by about an order of magnitude. Even twitch pales in comparison to the sheer amount of data being processed and stored