Probably MS and Azure too, I suspect YouTube has some serious optimisations going on on the back end too, not that I don't think MS/Amazon engineers could overcome them, but I suspect it would take quite a while for their offerings not to be a bit janky in comparison. YouTube had the advantage of scaling as the users did and overcoming the problems as they arose.

The scale of YouTube is just mind boggling to me, like I work with big data by any reasonable definition of the term, but YouTube is on another level altogether - they ingest petabytes of data every day and make that available globally basically forever. There's no stutter or latency when I load a 10 year old video, which suggests they're keeping this all reasonably live and with multiple 9s availability. It's staggering.

The other issue I have with another big corp entering the market is the sheer waste of it all, creators probably won't want to be exclusive to a platform - which means we're going to triple an already huge data platform.

The other drawback for newcomers is the history YouTube has, nobody is going to reupload an ancient video on how to tear down my washing machine to a new platform, but I'm damned if that didn't save me £100 on getting a repair man to replace a gasket, which is to say there's an awful lot of knowledge tied up in YouTube and I think that needs protecting.