Edit: To clarify:
Is it even possible, financially speaking, to keep adding storage? I mean, advertisements don’t even make a lot of money, is the indefinite growth of server storage even sustainable?
Or will they do what Twitch does with old content and just delete them?
I wouldn’t assume Googe pays less for storage. They need to pay for land use in many countries, power usage, redundancy and the staff that manages all of it.
They also need powerful servers with fast caching storage and a lot of RAM. They also need to pay for the bandwidth.
As far as I know, they save multiple copies of each video in all resolutions they serve. So an 8K video will also have 4K + 1440p + 1980p + 720p + 480p + 240p + 144p Possibly also 60Hz and 30Hz for some of them and also HDR versions.
You have to add all that to the cost per TB. Finally, there is the question of how much additional storage they need per year, 100 PByr? Presumably also increasing yearly?
I wasn’t calculating server costs, just raw storage. Google is not buying hard drives at retail prices. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re paying as little as 50% of the retail price to buy at volume.
All of what you say is true but the purpose was to get a back of the envelope estimation to show that the cost of storage is not a truly limiting factor for a company like youtube. My point was to answer the question.
With the level of compression youtube uses, the storage costs of everything below 4k is substantially lower than 4k by itself: for back of envelope purposes we can just ignore those resolutions.
Do you absolutely know they’re storing those qualities individually? It’s perfectly plausible that they do on the fly transcoding.
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