Honestly, I am surprised it took them this long. This technology has existed for a while, there is even a standard for it (see: SCTE-35).
The harsh truth of the matter is that YouTube is a victim of its own success. The sheer scale of what is needed to keep the platform running at its current level of activity is something that I think most people don’t give a second thought to. It requires a truly astonishing amount of technical expertise, infrastructure, monitoring, throughput capacity, not to mention sheer compute and storage, to keep it running. And that is considering the technical side alone, never mind the business that has evolved around it
All of the above costs money. A lot of money. So much money that only a shitty mega corporation with no moral scruples would ever be able to afford to run the platform, let alone turn a profit. And so here we are.
There are niche alternatives like PeerTube, but in practice it is currently in no state to be a drop in replacement. If the fediverse had to deal with the amount of traffic and content from YouTube in its current state, it would collapse immediately. This won’t change until the user base begins to increase, but to do so requires an incentive for people to jump over. And sadly, far too many people just don’t care enough about avoiding ads to do so.
I think in the long term there will be a reckoning; no matter the size of your platform you are not invulnerable to change. Nobody back in the early 2010s could foresee Twitter falling from grace, and look how that turned out. YouTube will eventually die, the only question is who will be footing the bill for what replaces it.
In the meantime, if you’re unable or unwilling to deal with YouTube’s ads, or pay to skip them, then just don’t engage with the platform at all. Read a book. Touch some grass. They haven’t found a way to monetize that (yet).
If the fediverse had to deal with the amount of traffic and content from YouTube in its current state, it would collapse immediately.
The Fediverse would be a very different place if it was hosting anything remotely close to YouTube tier traffic. FFS, how much of the Fediverse is even outside English speaking countries? None of our systems are getting bombarded with hundreds of gigabytes of Good Morning messages like Whatsapp is dealing with in India, for instance.
So much of the content on these big services is both trivial in terms of audience and enormous in terms of relative file size. My sister-in-law sent me a thirty minute compilation video from their latest summer vacation, which she hosted to YouTube. That video is going to get maybe five views, unless one of us goes back to watch it a second time. How much is it costing YouTube to host and stream? Obviously far more than what they make from any of us.
Now scale that up to millions.
The Fediverse isn’t trying to do anything remotely like that.
It’s not just file size either. Video basically has several different things going on, where improving on one aspect tends to require compromise on the others:
Resolution
Frame rate
Quality
Bit rate (file size)
Encoding complexity
Decoding complexity (which affects battery life of mobile devices viewing the content)
Robustness for dropped or corrupted data
Over time, the standards improve, but generally benefit from specialized hardware for decoding (thus making decoding complexity a bit more complicated when serving a lot of people with different hardware).
Netflix, for example, serves a small number of very large files to many, many people on demand. That means they benefit from high encoding complexity, even if it shaves off a tiny bit of file size, because spending a few extra hours on encoding a movie that’s 10mb smaller is worth it if 10 million people watch that movie, as that’s 100 terabytes of traffic saved.
But YouTube/Facebook and the others with a lot of user-submitted video, they’re ingesting hundreds of hours of content every minute, chopping it up into like 5 different resolutions/quality levels.
Then YouTube has a shitload of processes for determining which video gets which treatment. A random upload of a kid’s birthday party might get a few hundred views at most, so YouTube cares less about file size and more about saving that computational complexity up front. But if a video hits 1000 views in a few minutes, that means it’s on the cusp of going viral, and it might be worth re-encoding with the high cost encodings that save space/bandwidth.
If a service doesn’t scale, it won’t be necessary to have that kind of complexity in the service. But those videos will load a bit slower, use a little more battery and bandwidth to watch, be more prone to skipping/distortion, etc.
Video is hard. User submitted video is harder. Especially at scale.
All of the above costs money. A lot of money. So much money that only a shitty mega corporation with no moral scruples would ever be able to afford to run the platform, let alone turn a profit.
Some estimates put the total number of YouTube Videos around 500 million, and I’ll say each video takes 200MB to store every version. That’s only an extra $24 million a year. With back-end processing and other stuff I’ll bump that total up to $2.0 billion a year for hosting fees, if you were to run YouTube on AWS.
Honestly, I am surprised it took them this long. This technology has existed for a while, there is even a standard for it (see: SCTE-35).
The harsh truth of the matter is that YouTube is a victim of its own success. The sheer scale of what is needed to keep the platform running at its current level of activity is something that I think most people don’t give a second thought to. It requires a truly astonishing amount of technical expertise, infrastructure, monitoring, throughput capacity, not to mention sheer compute and storage, to keep it running. And that is considering the technical side alone, never mind the business that has evolved around it
All of the above costs money. A lot of money. So much money that only a shitty mega corporation with no moral scruples would ever be able to afford to run the platform, let alone turn a profit. And so here we are.
There are niche alternatives like PeerTube, but in practice it is currently in no state to be a drop in replacement. If the fediverse had to deal with the amount of traffic and content from YouTube in its current state, it would collapse immediately. This won’t change until the user base begins to increase, but to do so requires an incentive for people to jump over. And sadly, far too many people just don’t care enough about avoiding ads to do so.
I think in the long term there will be a reckoning; no matter the size of your platform you are not invulnerable to change. Nobody back in the early 2010s could foresee Twitter falling from grace, and look how that turned out. YouTube will eventually die, the only question is who will be footing the bill for what replaces it.
In the meantime, if you’re unable or unwilling to deal with YouTube’s ads, or pay to skip them, then just don’t engage with the platform at all. Read a book. Touch some grass. They haven’t found a way to monetize that (yet).
The Fediverse would be a very different place if it was hosting anything remotely close to YouTube tier traffic. FFS, how much of the Fediverse is even outside English speaking countries? None of our systems are getting bombarded with hundreds of gigabytes of Good Morning messages like Whatsapp is dealing with in India, for instance.
So much of the content on these big services is both trivial in terms of audience and enormous in terms of relative file size. My sister-in-law sent me a thirty minute compilation video from their latest summer vacation, which she hosted to YouTube. That video is going to get maybe five views, unless one of us goes back to watch it a second time. How much is it costing YouTube to host and stream? Obviously far more than what they make from any of us.
Now scale that up to millions.
The Fediverse isn’t trying to do anything remotely like that.
It’s not just file size either. Video basically has several different things going on, where improving on one aspect tends to require compromise on the others:
Over time, the standards improve, but generally benefit from specialized hardware for decoding (thus making decoding complexity a bit more complicated when serving a lot of people with different hardware).
Netflix, for example, serves a small number of very large files to many, many people on demand. That means they benefit from high encoding complexity, even if it shaves off a tiny bit of file size, because spending a few extra hours on encoding a movie that’s 10mb smaller is worth it if 10 million people watch that movie, as that’s 100 terabytes of traffic saved.
But YouTube/Facebook and the others with a lot of user-submitted video, they’re ingesting hundreds of hours of content every minute, chopping it up into like 5 different resolutions/quality levels.
Then YouTube has a shitload of processes for determining which video gets which treatment. A random upload of a kid’s birthday party might get a few hundred views at most, so YouTube cares less about file size and more about saving that computational complexity up front. But if a video hits 1000 views in a few minutes, that means it’s on the cusp of going viral, and it might be worth re-encoding with the high cost encodings that save space/bandwidth.
If a service doesn’t scale, it won’t be necessary to have that kind of complexity in the service. But those videos will load a bit slower, use a little more battery and bandwidth to watch, be more prone to skipping/distortion, etc.
Video is hard. User submitted video is harder. Especially at scale.
Great analysis
It’s cheaper than you think.
Some estimates put the total number of YouTube Videos around 500 million, and I’ll say each video takes 200MB to store every version. That’s only an extra $24 million a year. With back-end processing and other stuff I’ll bump that total up to $2.0 billion a year for hosting fees, if you were to run YouTube on AWS.