I completely disagree. If anything, Google having difficulties with profitability is an opportunity for a competitor to beat them (although I don’t think youtube is unprofitable).

Can something like this under Twitter management (current or previous) succeed? Probably not. But could a team of smart people with access to 300 million users build a video streaming platform that’s profitable? Hell yes, and the only major concern would be anti-competitive bs from Google, but the FTC has been paying more attention to that kind of stuff recently.

That doesn’t really matter, unless you expect the video feature to be unprofitable. With ~300m or whatever active users, it would not be hard to raise money if they need it to launch a major product like that.

I don’t get why Twitter didn’t try to make a Youtube-like video platform before? I wonder if it’s because venture capital has caused brain rot in the executive teams at these tech companies? It seems obvious to launch something like that, and they 100% have (had) the talent and infrastructure to build and support it. Even if it isn’t massively successful on day one, it could be successful in the future with a strong marketing effort.

If I didn’t know that these companies were run by incompetent idiots, my first suspicion would be some kind of collusion. Trying to do it now that Twitter is a sinking ship is laughable.

And run by a guy notorious for not paying his bills

To be fair, Google Cloud is an overpriced and unreliable dumpster fire of a service. I’m surprised Twitter was using them at all. Although, I guess when you’re paying billions of dollars, the service you get is different.

Flatbuffers! It’s like protocol buffers, but much leaner. It was actually specifically designed for games, and meets all your requirements.

The only challenge is that, like protocol buffers, it requires an extra compilation step and involves code generation. Depending on your build system, that could be a challenge.