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For the streaming factor specifically, I can at least offer something resembling an answer: Google. In the early 2000s they bought up a bunch of dark fiber and

For the streaming factor specifically, I can at least offer something resembling an answer: Google. In the early 2000s they bought up a bunch of dark fiber and peered with all the major US ISPs, and they were able to do this because no ISP wants to be the one that blocks or degrades Google. As a result they were able to host video streaming on their network without immediately being shut down by Comcast and co. Instead they had to go after Netflix. Google has a lot of custom encoding silicon, too, AFAIK. Storage is the biggest question of the three. Linus Sebastian specifically called this out when YouTube started really pushing to make the non-Premium experience dreadful. There isn't really some secret special sauce you can buy or make for storage. Literally everything is being stored with the same hard drives, SSDs, discs, or tapes you can just go out and buy. The only specialization you can do is build or buy equipment to handle extreme numbers of them. Google does buy these in bulk, so they probably get a discount on storage, but it's not something that would make storage costs just go away.

averageRoyalty 2y ago
> Google. In the early 2000s they bought up a bunch of dark fiber and peered with all the major US ISPs, and they were able to do this because no ISP wants to be the one that blocks or degrades Google. As a result they were able to host video streaming on their network without immediately being shut down by Comcast and co. This sounds like a good answer, but falls away drastically when you realise the vast majority of consumer of YouTube are outside of the USA, which in turn means so are those bandwidth costs. Are you guessing or have I missed something here? I can't see how this could be a significant enough factor to make the global model work.
echelon 2y ago
When does YouTube start deleting content? They'll have to do that eventually, right?
- sebzim4500 2y ago
  So long as storage costs decrease exponentially I think they'll keep everything. Especially if the amount of content uploaded keeps going up, so the relative benefit of deleting old stuff is small.
  - throwanem 2y ago
    > So long as storage costs decrease exponentially I think they'll keep everything. I agree. That's why I've recently made a practice of backing up things to which I'd regret permanently losing access. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-computer-memory-and-storage https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-comput...
  - noAnswer 2y ago
    Relatively recently they updated their policy. If you don't login to your account for two years they will delete everything. Source: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/12418290?hl=en https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/12418290?hl=en I have two accounts from my youth with mostly fansubs and "funny" vids. (A "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day"-Video that, 11 years after its upload, got band in Pakistan.) It includes two very successful (over 1M views combined) uploads of political TV shows. I will not log in to this this accounts. So this stuff will get deleted. So in the long run, stuff will disappear from YT.
    - Alphaeus 2y ago
      I believe YouTube content was explicitly exempted from that deletion.
      - noAnswer 2y ago
        You seem to be right. This Google Blog post[1] says "we do not have plans to delete accounts with YouTube videos at this time." [1] https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/updating-our-inactive-account-policies/ https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/updating-our-... Would be nice if they would write that into the actual policy and don't just add a random sentence to a blog post.
        kipchak 2y ago
        If I remember right the original policy was to delete the YouTube videos and after pushback the YouTube exception was added.
- k8sToGo 2y ago
  You don’t need to keep everything “hot” all the time. Storage tiers exist for a reason.
  - grepfru_it 2y ago
    My 15 year old videos with 30 views still load nearly instantly. It’s as close to hot as hot is
    - SirMaster 2y ago
      But they are tiny 480p files yeah?
    - crazygringo 2y ago
      Speed/latency doesn't tell you much, because it's all on a hard drive somewhere. The question is whether YT is serving up the one (redundantly-backed storage) copy they have of your almost-never-watched video, or whether it's serving it up from one of 1,000+ copies it's made across the globe for currently popular videos.
    - NBJack 2y ago
      Think about what you actually need to start a video. Maybe a dozen MB? After that, you can plunge into colder storages and warm things up as you stream. Additionally, if you need longer to 'defrost' things, just cache a few more MB at the front. Cheat a bit by assuming 480p to start with if you need to; even less to store.
      - londons_explore 2y ago
        There is also location location location. Maybe Google holds your content in 7 data centers round the world (~1 per continent for planned maintenance + latency + reduced oceanic fiber usage). But with old rarely streamed content they might cut that down to just 3.
    - spatulon 2y ago
      That doesn't match my experience. I have some unlisted videos that I or a small handful of friends might go back and watch once a year, and it takes several seconds of loading before they start playing. It's very noticeably different from the near-instant loading of most videos I watch.
- nradov 2y ago
  Old content has value for training AI models even if there are no human viewers anymore.
- Jyaif 2y ago
  Yes, it's inevitable. My guess is that the first step will be to re-encode all the non-popular videos with severe lossy compression.
  - londons_explore 2y ago
    They still keep the original uploaded files. You know that because when they release a new format (eg. HDR or a different resolution), they re-encode from the original. Various people have tested that with moire patterns and various other ways to demonstrate if something was encoded more than once.
- oefrha 2y ago
  I had an entirely private channel with a couple hundred 1-3 hour long HD recordings of video conferences / screen shares. Entirely private as in every video was private, no one but me ever had access to them. Last year the channel was nuked and the account banned because I apparently broke their rule on “impersonation”. Seriously. I could file a dispute, but in typical Google fashion that dispute disappeared into the void. Thankfully the YouTube ban didn’t affect other aspects of that Google account, and didn’t spread to my other Google accounts. I was worried for a minute since I have another account with >10k subscribers, and while I don’t do monetization, it would suck to have that nuked as well. I suspect that’s Google beginning to trim unprofitable channels using a lot of storage: delete them for bullshit reasons.
vundercind 2y ago
The bandwidth costs are the key. Good luck getting rates anywhere near what Google’s effectively are. Spoiler: you can’t. You probably can’t realistically get to 5x their costs, byte-for-byte. Which makes competing with them effectively impossible except for a very-few other megacorps.
- oceanplexian 2y ago
  Bandwidth costs are actually free, so this isn't exactly accurate. Most bandwidth is via settlement-free peering with thousands of ISPs around the world. At least that's how we did it at Twitch, and how we did it when I worked at a large CDN before that. There are still costs for backhaul, interconnect, colocation space, dark fiber, network hardware, and transit to fill the gaps. But this talk about how "Google can magically do it 5x cheaper" is nonsense.
  - michaelt 2y ago
    Don't Comcast and friends throttle any peering points you use, until you hand over $x per subscriber per month for them to stop doing so?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - jrockway 2y ago
      Typically the problem is that Comcast won't peer with you. They always use the excuse that they only peer with equals, and since they aren't sending you as much traffic as you're sending them, it's not in line with their peering policy. This, of course, is a problem of their own creation; they're cable so customers all have a tiny amount of upload bandwidth and a large amount of download bandwidth. It is unlikely their policy permits peering with anyone. The ultimate effect is that you have to buy transit from a Tier 1 ISP instead of with the consumer ISP directly, costing you money. There are, of course, backroom deals where they sell a subscription tier that doesn't include video and then they throttle all the video. That's different than the peering issues; there is enough capacity to send all of your packets to them, they just throttle them on their end to squeeze money out of their customers. I've worked at 2 ISPs and we obviously didn't have this peering policy, because it's dumb and it breaks the Internet. We also didn't throttle video, because it's dumb and breaks the Internet.
taberiand 2y ago
Once AI generated video gets particularly good, they could probably save a lot of storage by 'compressing' videos into textual descriptions and a few key screenshots that are reimagined on demand by the AI
- sambazi 2y ago
  getting closer to mythical storytelling of old every day
- Nurbek-F 2y ago
  What you are describing reminds me of Nvidia DLSS3 AI frame generation. Isn't the storage cheaper than compute, especially graphics?
- splatzone 2y ago
  Is there a way to run these things deterministically with a seed? Totally AI-generated videos could just be compressed to text without any reference screenshots
  - ddalex 2y ago
    isn't 90% of the videos compress-able to "cute kitty playing with something in a funny way"
mike_hearn 2y ago
> There isn't really some secret special sauce you can buy or make for storage. Well, there's this: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-silica/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-sil...

averageRoyalty 2y ago

> Google. In the early 2000s they bought up a bunch of dark fiber and peered with all the major US ISPs, and they were able to do this because no ISP wants to be the one that blocks or degrades Google. As a result they were able to host video streaming on their network without immediately being shut down by Comcast and co. This sounds like a good answer, but falls away drastically when you realise the vast majority of consumer of YouTube are outside of the USA, which in turn means so are those bandwidth costs. Are you guessing or have I missed something here? I can't see how this could be a significant enough factor to make the global model work.

echelon 2y ago

When does YouTube start deleting content? They'll have to do that eventually, right?

sebzim4500 2y ago
So long as storage costs decrease exponentially I think they'll keep everything. Especially if the amount of content uploaded keeps going up, so the relative benefit of deleting old stuff is small.
- throwanem 2y ago
  > So long as storage costs decrease exponentially I think they'll keep everything. I agree. That's why I've recently made a practice of backing up things to which I'd regret permanently losing access. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-computer-memory-and-storage https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-comput...
- noAnswer 2y ago
  Relatively recently they updated their policy. If you don't login to your account for two years they will delete everything. Source: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/12418290?hl=en https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/12418290?hl=en I have two accounts from my youth with mostly fansubs and "funny" vids. (A "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day"-Video that, 11 years after its upload, got band in Pakistan.) It includes two very successful (over 1M views combined) uploads of political TV shows. I will not log in to this this accounts. So this stuff will get deleted. So in the long run, stuff will disappear from YT.
  - Alphaeus 2y ago
    I believe YouTube content was explicitly exempted from that deletion.
    - noAnswer 2y ago
      You seem to be right. This Google Blog post[1] says "we do not have plans to delete accounts with YouTube videos at this time." [1] https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/updating-our-inactive-account-policies/ https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/updating-our-... Would be nice if they would write that into the actual policy and don't just add a random sentence to a blog post.
      - kipchak 2y ago
        If I remember right the original policy was to delete the YouTube videos and after pushback the YouTube exception was added.
k8sToGo 2y ago
You don’t need to keep everything “hot” all the time. Storage tiers exist for a reason.
- grepfru_it 2y ago
  My 15 year old videos with 30 views still load nearly instantly. It’s as close to hot as hot is
  - SirMaster 2y ago
    But they are tiny 480p files yeah?
  - crazygringo 2y ago
    Speed/latency doesn't tell you much, because it's all on a hard drive somewhere. The question is whether YT is serving up the one (redundantly-backed storage) copy they have of your almost-never-watched video, or whether it's serving it up from one of 1,000+ copies it's made across the globe for currently popular videos.
  - NBJack 2y ago
    Think about what you actually need to start a video. Maybe a dozen MB? After that, you can plunge into colder storages and warm things up as you stream. Additionally, if you need longer to 'defrost' things, just cache a few more MB at the front. Cheat a bit by assuming 480p to start with if you need to; even less to store.
    - londons_explore 2y ago
      There is also location location location. Maybe Google holds your content in 7 data centers round the world (~1 per continent for planned maintenance + latency + reduced oceanic fiber usage). But with old rarely streamed content they might cut that down to just 3.
  - spatulon 2y ago
    That doesn't match my experience. I have some unlisted videos that I or a small handful of friends might go back and watch once a year, and it takes several seconds of loading before they start playing. It's very noticeably different from the near-instant loading of most videos I watch.
nradov 2y ago
Old content has value for training AI models even if there are no human viewers anymore.
Jyaif 2y ago
Yes, it's inevitable. My guess is that the first step will be to re-encode all the non-popular videos with severe lossy compression.
- londons_explore 2y ago
  They still keep the original uploaded files. You know that because when they release a new format (eg. HDR or a different resolution), they re-encode from the original. Various people have tested that with moire patterns and various other ways to demonstrate if something was encoded more than once.
oefrha 2y ago
I had an entirely private channel with a couple hundred 1-3 hour long HD recordings of video conferences / screen shares. Entirely private as in every video was private, no one but me ever had access to them. Last year the channel was nuked and the account banned because I apparently broke their rule on “impersonation”. Seriously. I could file a dispute, but in typical Google fashion that dispute disappeared into the void. Thankfully the YouTube ban didn’t affect other aspects of that Google account, and didn’t spread to my other Google accounts. I was worried for a minute since I have another account with >10k subscribers, and while I don’t do monetization, it would suck to have that nuked as well. I suspect that’s Google beginning to trim unprofitable channels using a lot of storage: delete them for bullshit reasons.

vundercind 2y ago

The bandwidth costs are the key. Good luck getting rates anywhere near what Google’s effectively are. Spoiler: you can’t. You probably can’t realistically get to 5x their costs, byte-for-byte. Which makes competing with them effectively impossible except for a very-few other megacorps.

oceanplexian 2y ago
Bandwidth costs are actually free, so this isn't exactly accurate. Most bandwidth is via settlement-free peering with thousands of ISPs around the world. At least that's how we did it at Twitch, and how we did it when I worked at a large CDN before that. There are still costs for backhaul, interconnect, colocation space, dark fiber, network hardware, and transit to fill the gaps. But this talk about how "Google can magically do it 5x cheaper" is nonsense.
- michaelt 2y ago
  Don't Comcast and friends throttle any peering points you use, until you hand over $x per subscriber per month for them to stop doing so?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - jrockway 2y ago
    Typically the problem is that Comcast won't peer with you. They always use the excuse that they only peer with equals, and since they aren't sending you as much traffic as you're sending them, it's not in line with their peering policy. This, of course, is a problem of their own creation; they're cable so customers all have a tiny amount of upload bandwidth and a large amount of download bandwidth. It is unlikely their policy permits peering with anyone. The ultimate effect is that you have to buy transit from a Tier 1 ISP instead of with the consumer ISP directly, costing you money. There are, of course, backroom deals where they sell a subscription tier that doesn't include video and then they throttle all the video. That's different than the peering issues; there is enough capacity to send all of your packets to them, they just throttle them on their end to squeeze money out of their customers. I've worked at 2 ISPs and we obviously didn't have this peering policy, because it's dumb and it breaks the Internet. We also didn't throttle video, because it's dumb and breaks the Internet.

taberiand 2y ago

Once AI generated video gets particularly good, they could probably save a lot of storage by 'compressing' videos into textual descriptions and a few key screenshots that are reimagined on demand by the AI

sambazi 2y ago
getting closer to mythical storytelling of old every day
Nurbek-F 2y ago
What you are describing reminds me of Nvidia DLSS3 AI frame generation. Isn't the storage cheaper than compute, especially graphics?
splatzone 2y ago
Is there a way to run these things deterministically with a seed? Totally AI-generated videos could just be compressed to text without any reference screenshots
- ddalex 2y ago
  isn't 90% of the videos compress-able to "cute kitty playing with something in a funny way"

mike_hearn 2y ago

> There isn't really some secret special sauce you can buy or make for storage. Well, there's this: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-silica/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-sil...