YouTube has now begun skipping videos altogether for users with ad blockers

Reality_Suit , 1 month ago

We need a publicly funded video hosting service like PBS.

chiisana , 1 month ago

Good luck getting that through the system… the cost to run something like YouTube is… well, let’s just say the lack of real competitions speaks volumes.

emptyother , 1 month ago

The biggest drain is the copyright fights, I'm guessing. Defending against and pleasing every big company with an interest.

chiisana , 1 month ago

That’s a drop in the pond in the grand scheme of things. You just out source that out to rights management companies and absolve yourself from that obligation behind safe harbour. This is basically what they’re doing in this department. They’ve built Content ID for digital finger printing, and then invented an entire market for rights management companies on both sides of the equation.

On the other hand, 500 hours of video footage got uploaded to YouTube every minute per YouTube in 2022 (pdf warning). 30 minutes of video game content (compresses better), just the 720p variant using avc1 codec is about 443MB of space. Never mind all the other transcodes or higher bitrates. So say 800MB per hour of 720p content; 500 hours of content per minute means 400GB of disk space requirement, per minute; 500TB of disk space per day.

That’s just video uploaded to YouTube. I don’t even know how much is being watched regularly, but even if we assume at least one view per video, that’s 500TB of bandwidth in and then 500TB of bandwidth out per day.

Good luck scaling that on public budget.