this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
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Is video hosting really that expensive, or is it the streaming part that's expensive? If there was an alternative where you had to download the video locally to watch it, would it still cause bandwidth issues? Even for those of us with the least possible attention span, I think waiting to download a video before you watch it is better than 3 90-second unskippable ads.
Downloading a video locally is more bandwidth intensive than streaming (they're the same if you watch the whole video, but if you're streaming and quit halfway through, that's only half the size).
Storage is cheap if you're some sort of curated thing like Netflix or a small service hosting just the videos for your blog. It's phenomenally expensive if you're doing what YouTube does and letting anyone upload as much as they want permanently.
Bandwidth for a small thing (blog) isn't horrible until something goes viral, then you have a choice between your site slowing to a crawl until it's unusable (traditional hosting), suddenly going dark (cloud with a spending limit), or suddenly costing an arm and a leg (cloud).
I think ad block can still get YouTube ads, and Invidious also basically blocks YouTube ads.
I had to switch to uBlock Origin Lite recently, and it works just as well on youtube as the full version did.
FireFox, FireFox with custom user.js, any FireFox forks, basically any Chrome forks, they all can use the much better uBlock Origin.
The Lite version isn't better in any way, there's only downsides. It doesn't have like less code or whatever for being "Lite", the main thing is that it is severely limited on the number of websites and ad providers it can work on. It also has limitations on how adblocking works, on the places it does adblock.
But you're right, YouTube is a massive site, so it's on the list, and the tech they develop for the original for YouTube works on the Lite version too.
For sure, but luckily there's zero difference between the two for what I'm using my laptop for. If someone had switched without me knowing I probably wouldn't even have noticed.
use one of the reskin chromes instead of actual chrome and the 100% real sugar ublock origin still works.
it's not expensive, people want treats in two clicks instead of dicking around with fintube/tubearchivist for couple of hours and then ~~forgetting about it~~ dicking every three months when something breaks
the gui is a treat we should all go back to command line
That'd piss off a lot of people... but what's more shocking for some, I'm sure, is the amount of "terminal junkies" out there who already have and very much want the rest of us to as well.
i mean jellyfin with plugged-in youtube rss downloaders is not that different from nice gui, only without for you sections, adds, login to verify etc. the annoying part is, on tvs, you can't easily have two clients for two different servers bu eh, small steps.
storage is cheap, delivery is the expensive part
For an individual video and such, it is very cheap. But YouTube operates at such a massive scale that storage makes up an enormous amount of their expenses. Unlike most companies, payroll is actually a tiny fraction compared to even just storage.
A big part of why alternatives don't exist is just how expensive storage is. It's why open source video systems have barely any public instances.
Other social media video places get around this by having short form videos, so they can store a lot of videos cheap. YouTube has a lot of really long videos, in addition to their short videos.
I think storage is still pretty expensive. It's cheaper than it used to be, but hosting unlimited hours of video indefinitely is not cheap. Especially if it isn't done by someone that owns the disks themselves (paying for cloud storage), and colocation is a pretty hurdle that I can't imagine being done as a non-profit.
Unfortunately 😢
Even with newer video compression? If your device just had to decompress the local video wouldn't that help? Sorry, it's been a while since I've been up to date on this stuff because looking into tech spaces is like peering into a portal to hell
Your device receives a stream of compressed video data and decompresses and renders it on the fly. The tech is called Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH). Small chunks are streamed at a time so the server isn't wasting resources sending the entire video file, based on the bandwidth available, desired resolution, and so on. It's why a YouTube video will never fully buffer, it's just sending the next few seconds and then waiting until it needs to send more.
Video is also really expensive. If we were still watching 360p videos it'd be fine, but as computers get more powerful and video serving becomes cheaper, we demand more. 60fps video. 4k video. VR video. And all videos must be stored forever and must start loading in a few seconds max, which means you can't use tape to archive cheaply.
my understanding is that video files are always in their compressed state, and have been since video compression has existed. i.e. it's always the local machine that's decoding the file. that said modern video compression is quite impressive (e.g. the change from h264 to h265), but upgrading all of YT to state of the art codecs is a significant amount of compute, and removing older files might create compatibility issues for users on older HW.
There's just an enormous amount of content, and an enormous amount of users. Even with fancy video compression, it's incredibly, wildly expensive. Afaik it still isn't profitable, nowhere near profitable even with premium and all the ads, it's basically subsidized by Google.
it might be profitable if they enumerated all the datamining they get from it, but there's a variety of reasons to operate at technically a loss