this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
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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