I remember someone on HN pointing out that Google reserves the right to delete YouTube videos without cause in the YouTube ToS. It was posited that they may eventually begin to remove unpopular or unwatched videos to save on costs.
But if they're not being watched, they don't consume bandwidth. YouTube's costs for hosting a video scale quite linearly with revenue derived from said video.
Is storage really that expensive at Google scale that this would constitute a real cost saving measure after engineering overhead of implementation and PR backlash?
YouTube stores at least 7ish copies of every video (different resolutions) and people record higher quality footage than they used and people have moved more away from bitrate-light vlogs to bitrate-heavy gaming videos.
And when you consider that hard drives have stagnated in price over the past few years, YouTube is doomed if it does not delete unprofitable videos. Unless prices to host content goes down, the whole thing becomes a sort of ponzi.
For a video that is viewed rarely enough they could store one (replicated) copy instead of seven (replicated) copies. Or turn off replication for six of those seven resolutions.
Yes but presumably there are storage replicas for each version of the video.
The suggested idea, which Google might already do, is to keep the low quality videos in less redundant storage on the theory that they can be re-encoded from the more durably stored original video if the underlying storage fails.
>And when you consider that hard drives have stagnated in price over the past few years, YouTube is doomed if it does not delete unprofitable videos
Not necessarily, is storage(and not retrieval) that much of a cost? and if so is youtube's revenue/storage cost actually decreasing? and if it is would the backlash for deleting people's videos worth the reputational cost? especially when you have an entire industry around small people trying to get big, the majority of which will never get there.
Youtube even tried putting a limitation on non-premium users watching 4k video and pulled back on it, can't imagine something as drastic as deleting videos would be worth it.
Cost of storage and cost of storage with a somewhat dependable backup strategy are two very different numbers. Chances are this "delete without naming a reason" clause resolves precisely to videos that won't be missed by many can get relegated to available until taken by bitrot without Google losing face.
Likely multiple stages downhill, from multiple site redundancy to single site but multiple hosts to multiple drives on a single host to single drive but still copied over if the drive reaches some scheduled EOL before of failure. Perhaps there's even a very last stage, available as long as that one drive is still powered up.
