To answer the “why not” part of that question, copying from one of my previous comments:
There’s an enormous amount of content uploaded to YouTube, as much as 30,000 hours of video uploaded per hour. That’s around 1PB per hour assuming most videos are uploaded in 1080p.
I wasn’t able to find an official source for what YouTube’s total data storage is, but this estimate puts it at 10 EB or 10,000,000,000 GB of video.
On Amazon AWS that would cost $3 Billion per month to store. The actual cost to Google is probably much lower because of economy of scale and because it is run by and optimized for them, but it is still a colossal figure. They offset the cost with ads, data collection, and premium subscription, but I would imagine running YouTube is still a net loss for Google.
If only we could crowdfund billions per month for a video site run by the community for the community!
Not that it makes much of a difference, but storing 10 EB on AWS S3 is more like 300 million USD a month. With some tiering options you can reduce that a bit further, but still it’s a huge number. Following your link you seem to have used FSx Lustre for calculation, not S3.
That calculation may also take into account upload and download bandwidth. And I know there are like 100 different cloud products in the AWS console. I don’t know much about high scale performance tuning but I bet dozens of those AWS services would be involved in something like youtube.
Just to put the storage issues in perspective, a minute of HD video is about 120mb. Moby Dick is 1.2 mb in plain text. So for every one minute of video, you could store all of Moby Dick 100 times.
I like Moby as an artist, but I really don’t want to read about his dick 100 times.
Peer to peer seems like a good idea to cope with the ridiculous amount of data used for videos. Hopefully this gets more popular over time!
It’s not peer to peer though. It’s similar to Lemmy and Mastodon where someone hosts an instance and serves video from that. Except with video it gets very expensive, so I don’t think server admins want to see a migration happen.
A peer to peer solution would actually be cheaper for everyone involved.
Does it have a payment model built into it?
Seems like infrastructure cost is a central problem of video hosting, so features to distribute that cost load among users would be must-have for any video service not bankrolled by a huge corp.
I believe there’s Peertube
