3 ms·
> 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 competiti
by 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.