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There was a weird movie with Justin Timberlake called "In Time" and I would use that model. The moment a video is born, it lives until its sponsored time runs

There was a weird movie with Justin Timberlake called "In Time" and I would use that model. The moment a video is born, it lives until its sponsored time runs out. If a content creator wants to leave something up and reap some internal ad-sales, or tip-generation scheme... they just have to sponsor the video with more time. People who like it, can also sponsor it. And sure, have some sort of "Library of Congress" feature to save videos deemed as significant... But once the time is up... the video is gone. Exists only in memories. Seems like a huge portion of videos are just taking up space... start pruning. And a lot of videos... they don't matter. 40 different versions of the same old song, 20 different shots of the same sports blooper, 900 different versions of the same boring news cast. Like... none of these need to be on there taking up space / inflating the hosting bill.

zamadatix 5y ago
Cold storage is next to toilet paper on their expense sheet. The vast majority of cost is in processing the incoming video and serving it, somewhere on the order of 25x more than the cost of storage if I recall an analysis from a ways back. Deleting the old content with such a system doesn't save much money, doesn't sound good to the users, and adds complexity. It'd be an interesting take on a popularity algorithm but they always seem to be toying with that too much as it is.
- dbg31415 5y ago
  Hmm... I'm skeptical. At some point, no matter how cheap cold storage is, the "dead" content costs will trump the live content streaming. Like postpone but... at some point content needs to be pruned. What's the value in keeping everything forever? 1 year after the video was last viewed? 5? Like when can you safely purge videos?
  - zamadatix 5y ago
    It's not just a postponement, old content takes less $ to store over time as well as takes up less % of storage over time. Just because it grows in absolute quantity doesn't mean it will inevitably become the largest costs. Now if 15 years from now storage has stopped becoming cheaper, the rate of new content has stopped growing, the size of new content has stopped growing, and the old content is starting to become a significant fraction of the operating costs then sure. At the moment (and for the last 15 years) none of those things is happening though.

zamadatix 5y ago

Cold storage is next to toilet paper on their expense sheet. The vast majority of cost is in processing the incoming video and serving it, somewhere on the order of 25x more than the cost of storage if I recall an analysis from a ways back. Deleting the old content with such a system doesn't save much money, doesn't sound good to the users, and adds complexity. It'd be an interesting take on a popularity algorithm but they always seem to be toying with that too much as it is.

dbg31415 5y ago
Hmm... I'm skeptical. At some point, no matter how cheap cold storage is, the "dead" content costs will trump the live content streaming. Like postpone but... at some point content needs to be pruned. What's the value in keeping everything forever? 1 year after the video was last viewed? 5? Like when can you safely purge videos?
- zamadatix 5y ago
  It's not just a postponement, old content takes less $ to store over time as well as takes up less % of storage over time. Just because it grows in absolute quantity doesn't mean it will inevitably become the largest costs. Now if 15 years from now storage has stopped becoming cheaper, the rate of new content has stopped growing, the size of new content has stopped growing, and the old content is starting to become a significant fraction of the operating costs then sure. At the moment (and for the last 15 years) none of those things is happening though.