this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2024
662 points (98.7% liked)
Technology
59652 readers
5525 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Content delivery is not cheap, but not hard to do, either. I'd wager storage would be a bigger problem, because it just keeps rising. Sadly, YouTube is the one with money, and the monetization comes from people.
I can speak from experience that content delivery is harder than storage. Companies like YouTube tackle the storage issue by having tiered storage levels. Trending content is stored on SSDs, new and often viewed content is stored on harddrives with a caching system similar to optane and archived storage (essentially old videos that very rarely get views) goes on tape storage. It's really cool, and it allows massive about of storage in a small space, it's costs alot to implement but because of the tape storage they essentially have "infinite" (it's not really infinite of course but it's a problem for next decade not this decade).
Fair enough, but that's YouTube, who can afford all of it. Of course, if you have tons of money, you don't need to count pennies where counting them would just slow you down.
But take a competitor - how can a different service be viable if they lack money to have (virtually) infinite storage? Heavy moderation or monetization. Youtube kinda does the second one.
To reiterate, I am not saying you say things that are not correct.
I remember seeing a startup at one point that wanted to put mini-CDNs in people's homes. Small black boxes that would automatically be a CDN not just for your home, but the whole area. Of course, sites would have to use their CDN network, etc.
I actually thought it was a really interesting idea. Almost like federated CDNs.
Imagine if every Xfinity router has a built-in 16TB CDN: it would be an interesting way to possibly change how bandwidth works and makes it back to the DCs. Most popular stuff would be closer, faster.
God could you imagine the security risks though, having a physical risk in a network, that would be fun. Limewire on steroids.