Louis Rossmann just posted a video on how YouTube’s war against ads is backfiring and I wanted to just ask the question because YT burned money for the vast majority of its existence, but I’m just wondering why is video hosting so expensive in the first place, is it because you need mods to make sure people don’t post CP, legal purposes, videos take too much data, what exactly?
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Let’s say someone uploads a 4K video. Unless you want your service to have to transcode video every time someone tries to play it, you’re transcoding it at least once to different qualities (2K, 1080p, 720p, 480p, etc.) that you also have to store. And also to a more manageable bitrate than the original, still in 4K.
And you’re probably also transcoding it to different codecs so that it can be streamed on devices that don’t support the latest.
Now people can watch that video, but it’s going to be slow if they aren’t near the datacenter. You need a CDN, with copies of all the various copies of that video distributed geographically.
And you also need user interaction, such as likes and comments. And you have to do all of this on a massive scale where some videos may get thousands of likes per second.
This is why almost nobody self-hosts video streaming even on a small scale. It’s why independent photo blog sites were and are a thing but independent “vloggers” are not.
The obvious solution to this issue is to have a paid service, but that’s a hard sell when YouTube is “free” and difficult to pull off when payment processors are all trying to deplatform you.
Exactly The idea with YouTube was to get everyone to upload based on the free premise. This was even more valuable back when youtube started. The bitrates were lower, but most people's ability to store video was even lower than that.
Then figure out how to monetize that. People are currently worried about YouTube monetization, so they have people's videos including Mr Rossman here.
You can actually see how many different AV streams exist for a particular video with ytp-dl. Somebody posted a video above and I popped it in just to illustrate, and there's about 10 audio files, and 30 video files (YT's player combines them on playback, presumably). I don't know if the IDs it reports represents a standard list, but if it does, it means Youtube supports at least 600 different preset combinations of formats and settings. It's hard to imagine, but YT is actually a pretty impressive machine, underneath the garbage front-end and the megalomaniacal social engineering.
I think eventually YouTube will adopt a model where content creators will have to pay for both storage and bandwidth while individuals who want to share videos via YouTube will have to use their Google One storage.
Patreon can financially benefit from the hosting of content on Google's servers and serving it to paid subscribers while contributing zero to Google. Eventually that will be stopped by Google either by buying Patreon or restrictions on hosting content privately until Patreon or the content creator coughs up.