And yet up until a couple years ago at least Netflix served a higher percentage of web traffic. Don't know about now, maybe that changed. There is only so many

And yet up until a couple years ago at least Netflix served a higher percentage of web traffic. Don't know about now, maybe that changed. There is only so many hours in the day and so many eyeballs watching, that is your upper bound. Bandwidth like that is not available to mere mortals, you would have to colocate with a lot of ISPs all over the place. Would take years to setup, not really even a question of money. In the case of Netflix their content library fits inside one such colocated server, which can (or pretty soon will) do 1tb/s. Hundreds of thousands of streams per box are within reach, especially at YouTube potato resolutions. In the case of Youtube while the long tail is very very long, I bet the most popular content of the week would fit into a similar sort of server. So the serving portion at least is an endeavor on the order of magnitude of say 1 billion dollars a year. No idea how to estimate letting anybody upload unlimited amounts of video of unlimited length and transcoding it into a dozen sizes. I think they did that early on to solidify their moat and it seems like a huge waste.