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this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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If one video stream to one user uses 128 kilobyte per second out of your 100 megabit internet connection 781 users can watch that stream at the same time. However, the ISP will charge you per transferred gigabyte each month. So let's say that you serve 781 users that video 24/7 in a full month of 31 days ... It will be 100 megabit divided by 8 to get 12.5 megabyte. So it's 12.5 megabyte per second. That's 750 megabyte per minute. That's 45 gigabyte per hour. That's 1 terabyte or day. So around 31 terabyte traffic per month. (If you use this much bandwidth you will get a discount but it's still not going to be
Now, that's just for 781 simultaneously users.
What is we need to serve 781000 simultaneous users?
Now, this far we've only been talking about one video on repeat 14/7. What about 100000 videos and enough programmers and computers to design as system that lets each and every user choose any video whenever they need to? Now you suddenly have thousands of servers and harddisks running in a couple of hundred places on earth 24/7.
Now this is for you to provide your users 100000 different videos even before you start to pay content creators for their hard work.
Also, you need to be available 24/7 so now you have to make backups, redundant servers on different location that can take over in case of an accident, dedicated internet connection (being alone on the internet cable is not the same as sharing it with 100 other sites) and a whole lot of other things you need to take care of.
What about offering the 500 million videos YouTube offers their users?
... and all of this cost is paid out of your pocket?
By your reasoning, every single platform should be in the same shitty state of yt
What comparable platforms are you talking about that is not running ads or have some sort of pay-to-watch?
If we talk about Twitch and their revenue I can promise you that they would not be very profitable without female streamers dressed sexy that doesn't always play video games.
We now live in a world where users got used to never have to pay for content or experience. Even though Google makes insane money in different areas the cost for running and developing YouTube is huge. I'm not a fan of ads (I don't see ads when at home because of how I have set up my network) and the subscription plans always seems too pricey for the value I get when using different streaming services
But all of this doesn't change the fact that even though I don't like ads or paying for content I still haven't come up with a better solution myself.
Text things are extremely data light. All of wikipedia's text is smaller than a 2k movie. There is absolutely data stuff happening in the background on the server that makes it more complicated, but the actual piped data that goes from a google search result is actually quite small (though larger than it used to be).
Video is at the other end. There's only so many things you can do to a video to reduce the amount of stuff you send to the user (and a lot of the things you do put more strain on the user's computer to interpret what you've sent).
Music, singular images, video game data, and mass data tend to be somewhere in the middle, though context does matter for each of them.
Comparatively, sending videos and storing videos for later use is many times a more resource-expensive task than sending an image, forum post, email, weather updates etc.
It doesn't have to be ads before videos, but it does have to be something (subscription services, the page itself being littered with ads, state backing etc).