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It's been a while since they removed it. It's probably because playing rarely-played videos costs more in bandwidth. You can still find them, of course, but it'

by gniv 3y ago

It's been a while since they removed it. It's probably because playing rarely-played videos costs more in bandwidth. You can still find them, of course, but it's more work.

colejohnson66 3y ago
True. The most recent videos of popular channels would be cached in multiple locations to improve latency, but rarely accessed videos would exist at only one (or two for redundancy) data center.
terinjokes 3y ago
It's one reason why I love channels that take the time to make meaningful playlists: they're in whatever order the channel decides, which is often oldest-first in the context of a regular series.
- MikusR 3y ago
  In my experience that kind of playlists are always newest first.
  - terinjokes 3y ago
    I watch a channel that has hundreds of videos playing a city builder, with playlists for each city they've streamed. I just looked and they're all oldest to newest, but yeah, I guess its up to the creator. The frustrating bit if they get it wrong is YouTube autoplays the next video, which would be going backwards for you.
matteoraso 3y ago
>It's probably because playing rarely-played videos costs more in bandwidth. Huh? Why would that be the case?
- Fauntleroy 3y ago
  They exist on fewer servers, so they have to be pulled from deeper levels of cache, or maybe even no cache. Popular videos will be cached on edge servers all over the place, and will be quick and easy to deliver.
  - matteoraso 3y ago
    That's a good point that I didn't consider. Still, I don't think this was the right direction to go. If the videos were already rarely watched, going out of your way to make them less watched isn't going to save much bandwidth.
    - bvaldivielso 3y ago
      How do you know?
- s3p 3y ago
  Azure, AWS, Google cloud all pay less for data that gets accessed regularly. Google Cloud charges $0.02 / month for each gigabyte of storage, but if you store it in an infrequently accessed volume you can qualify for special pricing of $0.0012 / GB / month. That's a 177% difference in storage costs for cold storage vs hot storage. So yeah, it's MUCH cheaper to store it in infrequently accessed volumes. And stopping people from finding the oldest videos allows them to do that.
  - matteoraso 3y ago
    According to Google Cloud, archival storage is only meant to be accessed once a year at most. Even infrequently watched videos should be considered hot (i.e. likely to be accessed more than once a month).
sircastor 3y ago
I think they also realized they didn’t want to be a video archive service but a “come back for the new thing” service. Otherwise they’re just holding everyone’s home movies
secret-noun 3y ago
I feel that this change served creators (too): Long-running channels transform over time, in production value, niche, style, messaging, etc. Creators want you to look at this new image instead of their old one. (Imagine looking through your old vs new social media posts... which would the current-you agree with more?)
- frou_dh 3y ago
  Indeed, that was actually my inkling rather than the infrastructure cost angle. Though it doesn't make sense that it would be blanket applied, rather than being part of channel configuration for those creators who care about it.

by gniv 3y ago

It's been a while since they removed it. It's probably because playing rarely-played videos costs more in bandwidth. You can still find them, of course, but it's more work.

colejohnson66 3y ago

True. The most recent videos of popular channels would be cached in multiple locations to improve latency, but rarely accessed videos would exist at only one (or two for redundancy) data center.

terinjokes 3y ago

It's one reason why I love channels that take the time to make meaningful playlists: they're in whatever order the channel decides, which is often oldest-first in the context of a regular series.

MikusR 3y ago
In my experience that kind of playlists are always newest first.
- terinjokes 3y ago
  I watch a channel that has hundreds of videos playing a city builder, with playlists for each city they've streamed. I just looked and they're all oldest to newest, but yeah, I guess its up to the creator. The frustrating bit if they get it wrong is YouTube autoplays the next video, which would be going backwards for you.

matteoraso 3y ago

>It's probably because playing rarely-played videos costs more in bandwidth. Huh? Why would that be the case?

Fauntleroy 3y ago
They exist on fewer servers, so they have to be pulled from deeper levels of cache, or maybe even no cache. Popular videos will be cached on edge servers all over the place, and will be quick and easy to deliver.
- matteoraso 3y ago
  That's a good point that I didn't consider. Still, I don't think this was the right direction to go. If the videos were already rarely watched, going out of your way to make them less watched isn't going to save much bandwidth.
  - bvaldivielso 3y ago
    How do you know?
s3p 3y ago
Azure, AWS, Google cloud all pay less for data that gets accessed regularly. Google Cloud charges $0.02 / month for each gigabyte of storage, but if you store it in an infrequently accessed volume you can qualify for special pricing of $0.0012 / GB / month. That's a 177% difference in storage costs for cold storage vs hot storage. So yeah, it's MUCH cheaper to store it in infrequently accessed volumes. And stopping people from finding the oldest videos allows them to do that.
- matteoraso 3y ago
  According to Google Cloud, archival storage is only meant to be accessed once a year at most. Even infrequently watched videos should be considered hot (i.e. likely to be accessed more than once a month).

sircastor 3y ago

I think they also realized they didn’t want to be a video archive service but a “come back for the new thing” service. Otherwise they’re just holding everyone’s home movies

secret-noun 3y ago

I feel that this change served creators (too): Long-running channels transform over time, in production value, niche, style, messaging, etc. Creators want you to look at this new image instead of their old one. (Imagine looking through your old vs new social media posts... which would the current-you agree with more?)

frou_dh 3y ago
Indeed, that was actually my inkling rather than the infrastructure cost angle. Though it doesn't make sense that it would be blanket applied, rather than being part of channel configuration for those creators who care about it.