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Hosting costs. Basically. People have forgotten how to build a stack on bare-metal. Those that remember are either working at places that still run on bare-meta
by withinboredom 3y ago
Hosting costs. Basically. People have forgotten how to build a stack on bare-metal. Those that remember are either working at places that still run on bare-metal, or working for "the cloud."
For example, I'm running a 3-node, bare-metal cluster with 48 cores, 384 gb of ram, 3tb of redundant storage, and 1tb free egress ... for less than 150 bucks a month.
These same 3 machines, in Azure, would cost ~2k a month, or ~1k with 3yr reserved instances. That's a difference of an entire person's salary and then some.
But "scale!" ... yeah, if you're actually global, your "scale" is pretty consistent with a small lull in the UTC early morning. There's barely any reason to dynamically scale except for extenuating circumstances.
Anyway, without the economy of bare-metal, doing something like YouTube is basically nearly impossible. On bare-metal, you can pretty much get started on a single person's salary and still be able to eat dinner -- while servicing thousands of users.
- behnamoh 3y ago> Anyway, without the economy of bare-metal, doing something like YouTube is basically nearly impossible. On bare-metal, you can pretty much get started on a single person's salary and still be able to eat dinner -- while servicing thousands of users. That's why I wonder why Amazon (AWS), Microsoft (Azure), Meta (Facebook videos and IG) have not entered the game...
- withinboredom 3y agoUh. They have. - Amazon: Prime Video - Microsoft: LinkedIn - Meta: Facebook Even WordPress.com has their own video streaming service for small sites. The issue comes down to moderation and kicking bad content off. These days, virtually everyone has a video camera in their pocket, but when YouTube came out, it was very rare for someone to be able to create content. Thus they were able to scale up their moderation as the technology became less expensive to consumers. This would be a problem for any new-comers as well, but one that can be mitigated by using consumer grade LLMs that simply did not exist a few years ago.
- behnamoh 3y agoYes those serve videos but I'm talking about something like YouTube. Prime Video, for example, is in the AppleTV category.
- withinboredom 3y agoTechnologically, there is nothing different.
- PaulHoule 3y agoAmazon runs Twitch. Also YouTube is crossing over into that area, for instance, there are pay-per-view movies on YouTube and also YouTube has a service which is very similar to cable TV (and costs about the same.) As much as people complain about "Smart TVs", Android TV has a very nice interface that blends YouTube with other content, I've seen teenagers have a lot of fun with it.