• ramble81@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    So it’s approximated that YouTube currently has over 1 Exabyte of data stored (1,024 Petabytes, or 1,048,576 TB). A single 1080p stream is about 5Mbps and a minute of 1080p video takes about 20MB (all approximations).

    Assuming those above values:

    • Cost to store the data (assuming we’re going janky here) would cost at least $15 million (I’m under cutting this)
    • Bandwidth required to stream 1000x 1080p videos at the same time (YT does orders of magnitude more): 5Gbps you’re looking in the tens-of-thousands if you want to be reliable or use a CDN

    The long and short of it: it’s not cheap. If you only had a handful of videos and were streaming it to a limited set of people, it’s more manageable, but once you get to scale, it gets expensive quick.

    • nova_ad_vitum@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      The long and short of it: it’s not cheap.

      True, but not the key point. If it were merely expensive then more companies would do it.

      The issue here is that allowing anyone to upload a video and then serving it to literally anyone else, for free, is not a viable business model. You have to stuff it with ads to even come close to solvency and even then people fight back with ad blockers. I’m sure they experimented with embedding ads directly into the video stream by now and determined it’s not currently a good idea, but I think it’s coming.

      The point here is that I’m not even sure YouTube makes much of a profit (if any) . There’s no money to be made with this model which is why YouTube has nearly no competition.

      People brought up pornhub. Have you tried using that without an ad blocker (even with an ad blocker they have to keep getting around it to force ads on you)? That’s what you have to become to actually money with this model.

      • Mkengine@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        How would embedding help them if Sponsorblock already skips embedded sponsor ads from the creators? This seems like just an additional category for Sponsorblock.

        • Furbag@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          It would inject the ads directly into the video stream like how Twitch does it currently. It wouldn’t register as an advertisement for any blocking software to handle it without blocking the video you were trying to watch.

          Sponsor Block works because users flag the section of video that the creators edit into their own videos so it can be autoskipped by others with the addon installed.