3 ms·

I wonder how much savings they’d get by extracting things like that HBO intro or series intro songs and keeping a cached copy on the device, instead of download

• dsr_ 4y ago
  Let's estimate. First, set up the scenario. You're going to binge-watch an HBO Max series that is 10 x 1 hour episodes. Each episode has the HBO static card (7s), a 1m45s intro sequence, and a 2m30s trailing credits sequence where the first 30s is episode-dependent but the last 2m is constant across the series. This is a best-reasonable-case scenario, since we know that people do sometimes binge-watch a series like this. We can construct unreasonable scenarios which would do better (10 minute loop of an aquarium played for 24 hours) but they would be unreasonable. More often, I think, people tend to watch one movie or one episode of a show and then switch to something else or leave. The receiving device needs to have 3m51s of storage available for reuse across episodes. That's not unreasonable. At a 4K streaming rate of 10GB per hour (Youtube 4K uses more than this, Netflix uses less) that would be 260MB or so. That number does sound unreasonable, though. A typical streaming device has between 1 and 4GB of RAM available -- an Amazon FireStick 4K has 2GB, various modern Roku devices have 1 to 2 GB -- and eating a quarter of that speculatively does not make sense to me.