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> I'm convinced that by now after decades of bandwidth improvements etc we'd have free videos in the same way. If you can figure out a way to serve petabytes o

> I'm convinced that by now after decades of bandwidth improvements etc we'd have free videos in the same way. If you can figure out a way to serve petabytes of video every day for basically free, then you'd be rich. The simple truth is that bandwidth is not free. The numbers are, of course, not public, but Cloudflare published some stuff here https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-world/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-world... that we can use to guesstimate. Google likely has more peering agreements, but it still costs money. That's just bandwidth, serving video also costs compute (re-encoding the video in a bunch of resolutions is not free), and running the software to serve the video is also expensive, memory, storage to store said video, and generally just hundreds of datacenters around the world. You can serve a million RPS of static HTML on a crappy server in a closet for a few thousand dollars, but you absolutely cannot do the same for video.

globular-toast 3y ago
Everyone seems to have misunderstood my comment. I'm not saying a service like YouTube can be free. YouTube contains tons of low quality, pointless videos. Literally "content" (they even use that word themselves). You're thinking of all the millions of views of Mr Beast or the countless hours of turnkey video content like ASMR that get uploaded every day. I'm think of everyone serving their videos themselves like people have served text for decades. Do you really think your average HN blog post in video format would amount to "petabytes of video"? In other words, the technology I'm talking about here is the World Wide Web. That's all. As for encoding etc, that's dead easy and most people have the hardware at home to handle it. Bandwidth isn't free; I never said it was, but people already pay for their bandwidth as part of their ISP deal. Why do you expect people to pay twice?

globular-toast 3y ago

Everyone seems to have misunderstood my comment. I'm not saying a service like YouTube can be free. YouTube contains tons of low quality, pointless videos. Literally "content" (they even use that word themselves). You're thinking of all the millions of views of Mr Beast or the countless hours of turnkey video content like ASMR that get uploaded every day. I'm think of everyone serving their videos themselves like people have served text for decades. Do you really think your average HN blog post in video format would amount to "petabytes of video"? In other words, the technology I'm talking about here is the World Wide Web. That's all. As for encoding etc, that's dead easy and most people have the hardware at home to handle it. Bandwidth isn't free; I never said it was, but people already pay for their bandwidth as part of their ISP deal. Why do you expect people to pay twice?