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.
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.