Delivering isn't expensive, but storing is. Estimates from 2019 were that YouTube ingests 500 hours of video every minute[0] - if we assume the most conservativ

Delivering isn't expensive, but storing is. Estimates from 2019 were that YouTube ingests 500 hours of video every minute[0] - if we assume the most conservative bitrate for 1080p video, 4mbps, that's 900 gigabytes of video ingested every minute and 1.3PB every day - and a lot of videos are higher bitrate at 1080p or offer 1440p/4k options as well. Even if they're getting the best deal on Enterprise drives ever at $0.009/gb or $12k/day in storage costs, that's still half an exabyte a year, and with real-world storage sizes including 4k video, chances are they were already buying over 1 exabyte of storage every year in 2019 and are doing a lot more today. 0: https://www.tubefilter.com/2019/05/07/number-hours-video-uploaded-to-youtube-per-minute/ https://www.tubefilter.com/2019/05/07/number-hours-video-upl...