I'm not sure it would actually save them any money at all. They are still transcoding into the higher quality, so you don't save compute resources. The videos t

I'm not sure it would actually save them any money at all. They are still transcoding into the higher quality, so you don't save compute resources. The videos themselves are served from edge CDN nodes. Through peering agreements I doubt Google is paying much for bandwidth. I'm not sure where this would save Google any money. It seems to just be a helpful (if more symbolic) thing to do.