4 ms·

I'm guessing live video looks a lot different from a more static video site. I think encoding and storage are both quite expensive. You want to encode videos th

by foota 2y ago

I'm guessing live video looks a lot different from a more static video site. I think encoding and storage are both quite expensive. You want to encode videos that are likely to be watched in the most efficient ways possible to reduce network bandwidth usage, and every video needs at least some encoding. Based on some power laws etc., I would guess most videos have only a handful of views, so storing them forever and the cost to encode them initially is probably significant.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
timr 2y ago
Encoding and storage aren't significant, relative to the bandwidth costs. Bandwidth is the high order bit. The primary difference between live and static video is the bursts -- get to a certain scale as a static video provider, and you can roughly estimate your bandwidth 95th percentiles. But one big live event can blow you out of the water, and push you over into very expensive tiers that will kill your economics.
- foota 2y ago
  If they're not significant, then why does youtube build ASICs for doing video encoding? See e.g., https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/04/youtube-is-now-building-its-own-video-transcoding-chips/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/04/youtube-is-now-build...
  - jupp0r 2y ago
    Because when you are Youtube, even relatively marginal cost improvements can be huge in absolute. There is also the UX of having to wait X minutes for an uploaded video to be ready that is improved by this.
  - cebert 2y ago
    Doing so wouldn’t hurt and would make a sizable impact at the scale of Google?
  - oneplane 2y ago
    Because significance varies, as does optimisation. At YouTube scale it might matter more, or the benefits might be bigger, even if just to save some energy or carbon footprint (and even that might be just for a compliance or marketing line).
  - danielheath 2y ago
    AFAICT, the answer to "why does Google do X" is basically always "because someone needed a launch to point at when they're up for promotion".
  - westurner 2y ago
    VA-API, NVENC, nvenc > See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_NVENC#See_also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_NVENC#See_also NVIDIA Video Codec SDK v12.1 > NVENC Application Note: https://docs.nvidia.com/video-technologies/video-codec-sdk/12.1/nvenc-application-note/index.html https://docs.nvidia.com/video-technologies/video-codec-sdk/1... : > NVENC Capabilities: encoding for H.264, HEVC 8-bit, HEVC 10-bit, AV1 8-bit and AV1 10-bit. This includes motion estimation and mode decision, motion compensation and residual coding, and entropy coding. It can also be used to generate motion vectors between two frames, which are useful for applications such as depth estimation, frame interpolation, encoding using other codecs not supported by NVENC, or hybrid encoding wherein motion estimation is performed by NVENC and the rest of the encoding is handled elsewhere in the system. These operations are hardware accelerated by a dedicated block on GPU silicon die. NVENCODE APIs provide the necessary knobs to utilize the hardware encoding capabilities. FFMPEG > Platform [hw video encoder] API Availability table: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/HWAccelIntro#PlatformAPIAvailability https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/HWAccelIntro#PlatformAPIAvailab... : > AMF, NVENC/NVDEC/CUVID (CUDA, cuda-nvcc and libnpp) (NVIDIA), VCE (AMD), libmfx (Intel), MediaCodec, Media Foundation, MMAL, OpenMAX, RockChip MPP, V4L2 M2M, VA-API (Intel), Video Toolbox, Vulkan
  - djtango 2y ago
    If you make a billion, a 1% saving is 10 million. You can hire and fund a lot of activity with 10 million. If you make 1 million, 10k isn't going to go very far towards paying devs to save you 1%
  - throwaway984393 2y ago
    [dead]
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > But one big live event can blow you out of the water, and push you over into very expensive tiers that will kill your economics. But if you're broadcasting something live and what's killing you is that everyone wants to watch it at the same time... wouldn't you serve it P2P so that everyone is downloading it from each other rather than you?
  - vaylian 2y ago
    I doubt that live(!) P2P video sharing would work. You will have some users who get the video stream directly from you. These primary peers will then need to relay the same data through their tiny consumer DSL line (slow upload!) to secondary peers. These secondary peers will have a noticeable lag. It will get even worse when you have tertiary peers.
    - thaumasiotes 2y ago
      But the problem is that you have a gigantic audience. Many of them will make effective primary peers. If that weren't true, you wouldn't have a problem in the first place.
    - oliwarner 2y ago
      One great thing about P2P is you can provide more peers. You can surge inexpensive machines near your market and drastically reduce the load on your main servers. And home connections —while still largely asymmetric— are much faster than they used to be. Having 10mbps up means one client can serve two more. And there's a lot more FTTP with 100-1000mbps up too. These really make a difference when you have a large swarm.
      - IanCal 2y ago
        A problem with live is that everyone wants the content at the same time. One client can only serve two more after it has the content. Any drop in connection is also very disruptive because you don't have a big buffer and everyone wants the content now. A place this could work is streaming a conference, live-ish is the goal and the producers aren't rich. Sports would be the worst case.
donavanm 2y ago
Live has a _huge_ advantage in the storage side. In a purely "live" sense all of the content is temporally synchronised; every viewer is requesting approximately the same segments at the same time. Store the current chunks, and the last few minutes of seek time, in memory and put out on the wire to all of the viewers. Twitch talked about this a bit just before/after the AMZN acquisition. In a prerecorded video CDN managing that catalog is a PITA and does drive meaningful infrastructure cost. You need the "right" content to be in the correct location for low cost peering/transit/distribution, on the correct media for the total throughput:size, in the optimal number of encodings for efficient/quality playback, etc. This job is a lot easier when the provider controls the catalog, and has a limited catalog size. See some of the OpenConnect talks where they're "preloading" content offpeak to optimize IO allocation on the appliances. It was an absolute nightmare to try and manage with a many PB catalog with 3P content that service didnt control the release/popularity of. Edit: source, principal at AWS and was responsible for a lot of the prime video delivery once upon a time.
- andsoitis 2y ago
  > Live has a _huge_ advantage in the storage side. In a purely "live" sense all of the content is temporally synchronised; every viewer is requesting approximately the same segments at the same time. Store the current chunks, and the last few minutes of seek time, in memory and put out on the wire to all of the viewers. Twitch talked about this a bit just before/after the AMZN acquisition. With Netflix's Live events, you can seek anywhere up to time zero, not just the last few minutes.
  - adamomada 2y ago
    Apple does the same with the MLS soccer matches. I think you’re conflating “live” with “live and available on-demand anytime thereafter” Interestingly enough the Apple and I assume Netflix live streams come from the colo equipment in your ISP. So each box has their own recording as it happens.
  - gbalduzzi 2y ago
    Netflix already solved the on demand streaming at scale though, for them it is harder to do live events given the fact they are new to it
thaumasiotes 2y ago
> I think encoding and storage are both quite expensive. You want to encode videos that are likely to be watched in the most efficient ways possible to reduce network bandwidth usage, and every video needs at least some encoding. The minimum possible expenditure on encoding is "we require videos to be encoded like so; here's our help page on how you can do that". It's not even slightly expensive.
raydev 2y ago
There's still a "live" aspect to any YouTube video, though, since you can change the quality that's sent to you at any time.

by foota 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

timr 2y ago

Encoding and storage aren't significant, relative to the bandwidth costs. Bandwidth is the high order bit. The primary difference between live and static video is the bursts -- get to a certain scale as a static video provider, and you can roughly estimate your bandwidth 95th percentiles. But one big live event can blow you out of the water, and push you over into very expensive tiers that will kill your economics.

foota 2y ago
If they're not significant, then why does youtube build ASICs for doing video encoding? See e.g., https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/04/youtube-is-now-building-its-own-video-transcoding-chips/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/04/youtube-is-now-build...
- jupp0r 2y ago
  Because when you are Youtube, even relatively marginal cost improvements can be huge in absolute. There is also the UX of having to wait X minutes for an uploaded video to be ready that is improved by this.
- cebert 2y ago
  Doing so wouldn’t hurt and would make a sizable impact at the scale of Google?
- oneplane 2y ago
  Because significance varies, as does optimisation. At YouTube scale it might matter more, or the benefits might be bigger, even if just to save some energy or carbon footprint (and even that might be just for a compliance or marketing line).
- danielheath 2y ago
  AFAICT, the answer to "why does Google do X" is basically always "because someone needed a launch to point at when they're up for promotion".
- westurner 2y ago
  VA-API, NVENC, nvenc > See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_NVENC#See_also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_NVENC#See_also NVIDIA Video Codec SDK v12.1 > NVENC Application Note: https://docs.nvidia.com/video-technologies/video-codec-sdk/12.1/nvenc-application-note/index.html https://docs.nvidia.com/video-technologies/video-codec-sdk/1... : > NVENC Capabilities: encoding for H.264, HEVC 8-bit, HEVC 10-bit, AV1 8-bit and AV1 10-bit. This includes motion estimation and mode decision, motion compensation and residual coding, and entropy coding. It can also be used to generate motion vectors between two frames, which are useful for applications such as depth estimation, frame interpolation, encoding using other codecs not supported by NVENC, or hybrid encoding wherein motion estimation is performed by NVENC and the rest of the encoding is handled elsewhere in the system. These operations are hardware accelerated by a dedicated block on GPU silicon die. NVENCODE APIs provide the necessary knobs to utilize the hardware encoding capabilities. FFMPEG > Platform [hw video encoder] API Availability table: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/HWAccelIntro#PlatformAPIAvailability https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/HWAccelIntro#PlatformAPIAvailab... : > AMF, NVENC/NVDEC/CUVID (CUDA, cuda-nvcc and libnpp) (NVIDIA), VCE (AMD), libmfx (Intel), MediaCodec, Media Foundation, MMAL, OpenMAX, RockChip MPP, V4L2 M2M, VA-API (Intel), Video Toolbox, Vulkan
- djtango 2y ago
  If you make a billion, a 1% saving is 10 million. You can hire and fund a lot of activity with 10 million. If you make 1 million, 10k isn't going to go very far towards paying devs to save you 1%
- throwaway984393 2y ago
  [dead]
thaumasiotes 2y ago
> But one big live event can blow you out of the water, and push you over into very expensive tiers that will kill your economics. But if you're broadcasting something live and what's killing you is that everyone wants to watch it at the same time... wouldn't you serve it P2P so that everyone is downloading it from each other rather than you?
- vaylian 2y ago
  I doubt that live(!) P2P video sharing would work. You will have some users who get the video stream directly from you. These primary peers will then need to relay the same data through their tiny consumer DSL line (slow upload!) to secondary peers. These secondary peers will have a noticeable lag. It will get even worse when you have tertiary peers.
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    But the problem is that you have a gigantic audience. Many of them will make effective primary peers. If that weren't true, you wouldn't have a problem in the first place.
  - oliwarner 2y ago
    One great thing about P2P is you can provide more peers. You can surge inexpensive machines near your market and drastically reduce the load on your main servers. And home connections —while still largely asymmetric— are much faster than they used to be. Having 10mbps up means one client can serve two more. And there's a lot more FTTP with 100-1000mbps up too. These really make a difference when you have a large swarm.
    - IanCal 2y ago
      A problem with live is that everyone wants the content at the same time. One client can only serve two more after it has the content. Any drop in connection is also very disruptive because you don't have a big buffer and everyone wants the content now. A place this could work is streaming a conference, live-ish is the goal and the producers aren't rich. Sports would be the worst case.

donavanm 2y ago

Live has a _huge_ advantage in the storage side. In a purely "live" sense all of the content is temporally synchronised; every viewer is requesting approximately the same segments at the same time. Store the current chunks, and the last few minutes of seek time, in memory and put out on the wire to all of the viewers. Twitch talked about this a bit just before/after the AMZN acquisition. In a prerecorded video CDN managing that catalog is a PITA and does drive meaningful infrastructure cost. You need the "right" content to be in the correct location for low cost peering/transit/distribution, on the correct media for the total throughput:size, in the optimal number of encodings for efficient/quality playback, etc. This job is a lot easier when the provider controls the catalog, and has a limited catalog size. See some of the OpenConnect talks where they're "preloading" content offpeak to optimize IO allocation on the appliances. It was an absolute nightmare to try and manage with a many PB catalog with 3P content that service didnt control the release/popularity of. Edit: source, principal at AWS and was responsible for a lot of the prime video delivery once upon a time.

andsoitis 2y ago
> Live has a _huge_ advantage in the storage side. In a purely "live" sense all of the content is temporally synchronised; every viewer is requesting approximately the same segments at the same time. Store the current chunks, and the last few minutes of seek time, in memory and put out on the wire to all of the viewers. Twitch talked about this a bit just before/after the AMZN acquisition. With Netflix's Live events, you can seek anywhere up to time zero, not just the last few minutes.
- adamomada 2y ago
  Apple does the same with the MLS soccer matches. I think you’re conflating “live” with “live and available on-demand anytime thereafter” Interestingly enough the Apple and I assume Netflix live streams come from the colo equipment in your ISP. So each box has their own recording as it happens.
- gbalduzzi 2y ago
  Netflix already solved the on demand streaming at scale though, for them it is harder to do live events given the fact they are new to it

thaumasiotes 2y ago

> I think encoding and storage are both quite expensive. You want to encode videos that are likely to be watched in the most efficient ways possible to reduce network bandwidth usage, and every video needs at least some encoding. The minimum possible expenditure on encoding is "we require videos to be encoded like so; here's our help page on how you can do that". It's not even slightly expensive.

raydev 2y ago

There's still a "live" aspect to any YouTube video, though, since you can change the quality that's sent to you at any time.