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Maybe. Or maybe we'd live in a world with no major free video sites, because the bandwidth costs of hosting such a thing would be too great for any competitive

Maybe. Or maybe we'd live in a world with no major free video sites, because the bandwidth costs of hosting such a thing would be too great for any competitive business to bear. Google gets to run YouTube because they can afford to store a lot of video, and every ISP needs to peer with them just to reduce their own bandwidth costs. Few, if any other companies have that advantage. The monopoly in online video is almost certainly being caused by upstream monopolies in last-mile Internet service, which makes them able to decide what companies can and cannot economically run an online video service.

everforward 5y ago
> Maybe. Or maybe we'd live in a world with no major free video sites, because the bandwidth costs of hosting such a thing would be too great for any competitive business to bear. The storage costs have to be astronomical as well. The latest stat I can find is that 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute (~720k hours per day). Even assuming it's all standard definition, that's ~260MB per hour of video, which comes out to ~130GB of data uploaded per minute or roughly 187.2 TB per day. Full HD is roughly 5 times the size, so nearly a petabyte per day. People were estimating YouTube uses an exabyte of storage about 6 years ago. There are very few companies with the economies of scale to support running YouTube the way it currently is.