Edit: To clarify:
Is it even possible, financially speaking, to keep adding storage? I mean, advertisements don’t even make a lot of money, is the indefinite growth of server storage even sustainable?
Or will they do what Twitch does with old content and just delete them?
I wouldn’t assume Googe pays less for storage. They need to pay for land use in many countries, power usage, redundancy and the staff that manages all of it.
They also need powerful servers with fast caching storage and a lot of RAM. They also need to pay for the bandwidth.
As far as I know, they save multiple copies of each video in all resolutions they serve. So an 8K video will also have 4K + 1440p + 1980p + 720p + 480p + 240p + 144p Possibly also 60Hz and 30Hz for some of them and also HDR versions.
You have to add all that to the cost per TB. Finally, there is the question of how much additional storage they need per year, 100 PByr? Presumably also increasing yearly?
I wasn’t calculating server costs, just raw storage. Google is not buying hard drives at retail prices. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re paying as little as 50% of the retail price to buy at volume.
All of what you say is true but the purpose was to get a back of the envelope estimation to show that the cost of storage is not a truly limiting factor for a company like youtube. My point was to answer the question.
With the level of compression youtube uses, the storage costs of everything below 4k is substantially lower than 4k by itself: for back of envelope purposes we can just ignore those resolutions.
Do you absolutely know they’re storing those qualities individually? It’s perfectly plausible that they do on the fly transcoding.
Like LetMeEatCake said, storage is cheap, cheaper than CPU power. I don’t know for sure, but if you have a video that will be played 1000 times, what would be better? Transcode 1000 times or store 8 versions of the video?
I would imagine they store the highest available quality only by default and do on the fly transcoding until a certain threshold of views per time is reached. At this point they would then store the transcoded versions as well.
For videos with a lot of views it only makes sense to store the transcoded version as, like you say, storage is cheap. But fact is that the vast majority of uploaded videos get <1k views and for those it probably would make more sense to transcode them otf when needed.
I’d say there’s a significant amount of storage available for cache. On the first transcoding the video is saved to cache so that the cached version can be streamed in the future. After enough time lapses or the cache becomes full, the cached video is deleted
deleted by creator