I know memory is fairly cheap but e.g. there are millions of new videos on youtube everyday, each probably few hundred MBs to few GBs. It all has to take enormous amount of space. Not to mention backups.

  • mangomission
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    1 year ago

    Are you suggesting they don’t store different versions? This (speculative ik) suggests they do.

    • patsharpesmullet@vlemmy.net
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      1 year ago

      That response is almost 10 years old and completely outdated. I’ve designed and maintained a national media service and can confirm that on the fly transcoding is both cheaper and easier. It does make sense to store different formats of videos that are popular at the minute but in the medium to long term streams are transcoded.

      • mangomission
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        1 year ago

        Sure it’s old but the stats I posted in a lower comment show that at YouTube’s scale, it makes sense to store.

      • mangomission
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        1 year ago

        Do you have a source? My instinct is the opposite. Compute scales with users but storage scales with videos

        • NewNewAccount@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          No source but I imagine the amount of videos must be outpacing the amount of users. Users come and go but every uploaded video stays forever.

          • mangomission
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            1 year ago

            I think you might be underestimating how many users YouTube has! According to this, 720,000 hours per day are uploaded versus 1,000,000,000 hours are watched per day!

            • NewNewAccount@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              No assumptions about specific usage. Just that at a certain point or in certain scenarios (that I’m sure YouTube’s engineers fully understand), there’s a point where one becomes more cost effective than the other.

              Those are pretty incredible numbers though, wow. The scale of that usage is insane.

        • SHITPOSTING_ACCOUNT@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          Consider two cases:

          • the most recent MrBeast video receiving millions of views from all kinds of devices (some of which require specific formats)
          • a random video of a cat uploaded 5 years ago, total view count: 3

          Design a system that optimizes for total cost.