YouTube has now begun skipping videos altogether for users with ad blockers

dvdnet62@feddit.nl to Technology@lemmy.ml – 189 points –
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The biggest drain is the copyright fights, I'm guessing. Defending against and pleasing every big company with an interest.

That’s a drop in the pond in the grand scheme of things. You just out source that out to rights management companies and absolve yourself from that obligation behind safe harbour. This is basically what they’re doing in this department. They’ve built Content ID for digital finger printing, and then invented an entire market for rights management companies on both sides of the equation.

On the other hand, 500 hours of video footage got uploaded to YouTube every minute per YouTube in 2022 (pdf warning). 30 minutes of video game content (compresses better), just the 720p variant using avc1 codec is about 443MB of space. Never mind all the other transcodes or higher bitrates. So say 800MB per hour of 720p content; 500 hours of content per minute means 400GB of disk space requirement, per minute; 500TB of disk space per day.

That’s just video uploaded to YouTube. I don’t even know how much is being watched regularly, but even if we assume at least one view per video, that’s 500TB of bandwidth in and then 500TB of bandwidth out per day.

Good luck scaling that on public budget.

Extrapolating from this, we can say that Youtube hosts around 2.5 to 3 exabytes (2.5 to 3 million terabytes) of data. Interestingly, the total volume of data on the internet is, as of the end of 2023, around 120 zettabytes, so Youtube only makes up around 0.0025% of the total volume of all that data.

Most of the remaining space is used by porn obviously...

No, it’s a picture of your mum, cos she’s so fat. I’m sorry

the infrastructure cost required to host the quantity of video YouTube has is insane.

Microsoft could have done it if storage was all. They got the infrastructure, the tech, cdn infrastructure , and even had a lot of big business customers already using Azures media streaming services. Instead they are withdrawing.

And the fact that Microsoft noped out says it all.

Basically, the only orgs that have a snowball's chance of hosting a twitch/youtube are Amazon, Google, and Microsoft on account of them also being three of the largest "cloud" providers and having the resources at cost. Amazon/Twitch are scrambling to find a way to deal with the increasing shift to sponsored streams, Google/Youtube are cracking down on adblockers, and Microsoft just gave up.

I said infrastructure, not just storage. and yes there is even more involved like the user base, as we have seen with social media time and time again. Even if Microsoft built an even better YouTube (lol), it's still very likely no one would use it. It's a massive investment with a lot of risk.

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You say that like they even look at them. That's clearly not the case.

Of course they dont. Not a chance with that much video added every hour. Also everything gotta be automated. And in favor of those who can make the most legal trouble. And thats companies, not the many various smaller IP-owners.

Just rubs me the wrong way that only Google are finding this business worth it. None of the other companies, even with massive amounts of storage and cdn infrastructure, are able to compete for long.

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