Is bandwith that expensive nowadays? I feel the argument is valid but was implemented when bandwidth was way more expensive.
I mean, if I upgrade my home internet box to the 40€ tier I’ll have 10Gb symmetrical.
Edit: there are a lot of google fanbois here lol
It’s not about your bandwidth, it’s about YouTube’s bandwidth. You probably don’t care, but for them it adds up to a lot
I just showed how inexpensive it has become.
Do you think I think I’m youtube??
You showed your home bandwidth. It means absolutely nothing in this discussion.
How often do people watch the first few seconds of a video and not finish it? It happens a lot. It probably happens a lot more often than that user actually finishing it. We could be talking about doubling Google’s bandwidth requirement. Not to mention server CPU time, disk I/O. Do you have any idea how expensive the operational costs of YouTube probably are as it is? This is an efficiency game to successfully run a video platform which supports up to high bitrate 4k video at this unfathomable scale, servicing the entire planet.
It makes the most efficient sense for them to only let you buffer a little bit at a time, not more than you need.
I’m not kissing Google’s ass. I’m just pointing out that if you want the service to exists, it has to be designed as efficiently as possible, otherwise it won’t exist for long.
Like others mentioned - yes, I mean the bandwidth from the perspective of the one providing the service. For the same bandwidth that someone watched 10% of a video, paused it and never watched the remaining 90%, you can show those same 90% to someone else who’d actually watch it. That’s without counting the small overheads here and there, but hopefully you get the idea.
Well, if they didn’t push trash with their algorithms, maybe people would finish more videos.
That 10Gb link is almost certainly oversubscribed, though. You don’t actually have 10 Gb of dedicated constant bandwidth, you just have access to 10Gb of potential bandwidth. You’re unlikely to saturate that link very often, so you won’t notice, but it’s shared with other people.
It’s different from Google or any other company paying for bandwidth that’s being actually used, not just a pre-allocated link like your home internet.