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It's not impossible. It's merely a matter of resources and will. Google not only has to store all that video they also need to transmit it over and over again.

It's not impossible. It's merely a matter of resources and will. Google not only has to store all that video they also need to transmit it over and over again. An archivist would only have to write to store the video. If humanity makes it to the year 3000 we're going to be pretty disappointed that all that video was lost due to a lack of foresight.

jeffbee 6y ago
I bet the number of times the typical youtube upload is watched is zero. I think YouTube itself already fills the archival, non-transmitting role here.
- formerly_proven 6y ago
  Average views per video is around 10k. I don't know what the mode (most frequent number of views) is, but I'm almost certain it's not zero, since the uploader checking if the video uploaded correctly already counts as a view. Anyway, for archival purposes you don't need to save the plethora of formats Youtube keeps at hand for each video, you just need one size in one codec, and it probably doesn't have to be 4K or 8K, which probably reduces the storage requirements by one order of magnitude or so.
  - komali2 6y ago
    Is the average as relevant as some other statistical measure that I'm not knowledgeable enough to know about? For example if the vast majority of views are on 10% of the videos, the other 90% could be stored on less expensive hardware that has less bandwidth maybe? edit: for example the average net worth of an American is 76,000$ but toss a couple billionaires in the mix, whose net worth is larger by such an enormous factor, that the "average" is misleading
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - doersino 6y ago
      You’re thinking of the median (the value that ends up in the middle after sorting), which is indeed more useful in such cases. (Of course, boiling a wide distribution of values down to a single value, no matter by which process, is fraught with problems.)
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    Well, to show the video to the person who uploaded it you don't need to reencode it or push it to the edge or any of that. And I see no reason to believe that most videos are even watched by their creators.
  - 3pt14159 6y ago
    I'm the highly downvoted parent that said this is possible. It's only 45 years of video per day. That is very, very possible to save. That's roughly 600 terabytes of storage space a day. Which means that per month you're generating a long term storage bill that is about $18k more per month. So after a decade of operation your monthly bill is about $2.1m which is far, far, far cheaper than what we spend on plenty of things. Like I said above: This is not impossible. In fact, I bet the NSA is probably already doing it. At least for public videos. This truly is peanuts.
op03 6y ago
We get time travel by 2034 so no issues - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor

jeffbee 6y ago

I bet the number of times the typical youtube upload is watched is zero. I think YouTube itself already fills the archival, non-transmitting role here.

formerly_proven 6y ago
Average views per video is around 10k. I don't know what the mode (most frequent number of views) is, but I'm almost certain it's not zero, since the uploader checking if the video uploaded correctly already counts as a view. Anyway, for archival purposes you don't need to save the plethora of formats Youtube keeps at hand for each video, you just need one size in one codec, and it probably doesn't have to be 4K or 8K, which probably reduces the storage requirements by one order of magnitude or so.
- komali2 6y ago
  Is the average as relevant as some other statistical measure that I'm not knowledgeable enough to know about? For example if the vast majority of views are on 10% of the videos, the other 90% could be stored on less expensive hardware that has less bandwidth maybe? edit: for example the average net worth of an American is 76,000$ but toss a couple billionaires in the mix, whose net worth is larger by such an enormous factor, that the "average" is misleading
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - doersino 6y ago
    You’re thinking of the median (the value that ends up in the middle after sorting), which is indeed more useful in such cases. (Of course, boiling a wide distribution of values down to a single value, no matter by which process, is fraught with problems.)
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Well, to show the video to the person who uploaded it you don't need to reencode it or push it to the edge or any of that. And I see no reason to believe that most videos are even watched by their creators.
- 3pt14159 6y ago
  I'm the highly downvoted parent that said this is possible. It's only 45 years of video per day. That is very, very possible to save. That's roughly 600 terabytes of storage space a day. Which means that per month you're generating a long term storage bill that is about $18k more per month. So after a decade of operation your monthly bill is about $2.1m which is far, far, far cheaper than what we spend on plenty of things. Like I said above: This is not impossible. In fact, I bet the NSA is probably already doing it. At least for public videos. This truly is peanuts.

op03 6y ago

We get time travel by 2034 so no issues - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor