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I do wonder whether another approach would be starting to delete old videos with not many clicks unless you pay. This would seem to reduce storage bandwidth but

I do wonder whether another approach would be starting to delete old videos with not many clicks unless you pay. This would seem to reduce storage bandwidth but I suppose they still have to support the insane amount of uploads! Another thing would be if you upload stupid crap that no-one wants to watch, you get banned or sent a nasty letter or something...I don't know, I don't work in customer retention ;-)

scarface74 4y ago
Storage is cheap at scale. Bandwidth isn’t.
- iforgotpassword 4y ago
  But is it at YouTube scale? I just tried it, I can click 10 years old videos with ~10 views and it starts playing after 3 seconds. How does that work? How can you have ever video ever uploaded on hot storage? What kind of storage are they using? Flash is probably too expensive, even if it has higher density than spinning disks by today. So was that video on a spinning disk? Then it also didn't seem to have been some spun down disk, because it should have taken more than three seconds then. It just boggles my mind that every video ever uploaded to YouTube is ready to be accessed instantly. You think anything that hasn't been accessed in a few years should be tugged away on some tape somewhere and needs a minute or two to start playing
dylan604 4y ago
>I do wonder whether another approach would be starting to delete old videos with not many clicks unless you pay You click to view a video like this, but instead receive a message that states, please return in up to 2 hours while we fetch this content from cold storage. It'll help ensure you don't ever need to retrieve that content, the content is technically still available, but as the host you can start to whittle down online storage needs. Edit: Or, you can have the viewer pay for the rush to retrieve the content from cold storage with a viewer-pays model

scarface74 4y ago

Storage is cheap at scale. Bandwidth isn’t.

iforgotpassword 4y ago
But is it at YouTube scale? I just tried it, I can click 10 years old videos with ~10 views and it starts playing after 3 seconds. How does that work? How can you have ever video ever uploaded on hot storage? What kind of storage are they using? Flash is probably too expensive, even if it has higher density than spinning disks by today. So was that video on a spinning disk? Then it also didn't seem to have been some spun down disk, because it should have taken more than three seconds then. It just boggles my mind that every video ever uploaded to YouTube is ready to be accessed instantly. You think anything that hasn't been accessed in a few years should be tugged away on some tape somewhere and needs a minute or two to start playing

dylan604 4y ago

>I do wonder whether another approach would be starting to delete old videos with not many clicks unless you pay You click to view a video like this, but instead receive a message that states, please return in up to 2 hours while we fetch this content from cold storage. It'll help ensure you don't ever need to retrieve that content, the content is technically still available, but as the host you can start to whittle down online storage needs. Edit: Or, you can have the viewer pay for the rush to retrieve the content from cold storage with a viewer-pays model