this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2024
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https://gbtimes.com/how-much-does-youtube/
https://fastercapital.com/content/YouTube-cost-structure--YouTube-Analytics--Unveiling-the-Hidden-Costs-in-the-Cost-Structure.html
Estimated annual server cost: approximately $1 billion
Estimated annual data center cost: approximately $5 billion
Estimated annual bandwidth cost: $3 billion
Good luck running that shit from your closet server.
Sure, but you're assuming all content is on one server. With something like PeerTube, content is federated.
That said, I don't think federation is the solution here because a popular video is going to completely swamp that instance, but something P2P would probably work if you can stream from multiple seeders. Even if you copy like we do w/ Lemmy, you'd still end up with a handful of instances that are way more popular than the rest and those would get hammered if there's a particularly popular video.
If you can spread that $6B (ignoring bandwidth here) over 10M people, you end up with a very reasonable $600/year, and costs would go down as more people join the network. I also assume a lot of that is duplication to handle demand spikes, which is baked in to the P2P system, so a P2P system would probably be way cheaper to scale up.
Which is, in fact, exactly how PeerTube works: it's got BitTorrent built right into it.
Frankly, it's ridiculous how people keep harping on this "problem" as if it isn't long since solved.
I thought it was largely federated? I don't know how the internals work, so I don't know what group of peers it'll pull from.
Regardless, the problem PeerTube has little to do with its technical foundation IMO, but the network effect. If we get people to start using it, either we'll fix it or we'll develop something better, but getting creators to move is the first step.