I don’t think they’re attached to YouTube too rigidly. (Well, I hope at least.) In theory this should work with any platform that provides subtitles. But I think if YouTube falls, or blocks their API access, they would just start hosting the videos themselves.
> In theory this should work with any platform that provides subtitles.
Streaming platforms can vary quite a lot in how they choose to distribute subtitles. I've worked with scraping subtitles from both Youtube and Netflix and I will say that these platforms distribute subtitles very differently!
Yes! It will take some time to write a scraper for another platform (probably not Netflix haha), but after that it’s plug-n-play.
And of course, if they decide to host videos on their own platform, they can just import subtitles from srt/vtt/ass which should be easily possible with some open source library.
Yea YouTube is only one format we support. Users can also upload pdfs, mp4, docx, pptx, etc. And we already do support video hosting ourselves. It wouldn't be great if YouTube decided to part ways with us, but we'd be just fine.