Ask HN: Video streaming is expensive yet YouTube "seems" to do it for free. How?
399 by pinakinathc | 356 comments on Hacker News.
Can anyone help me understand the economics of video streaming platforms? Streaming, encoding, and storage demands enormous costs -- especially at scale (e.g., on average each 4k video with close to 1 million views). Yet YouTube seems to charge no money for it. I know advertisements are a thing for YT, but is it enough? If tomorrow I want to start a platform that is supported with Advert revenues, I know I will likely fail. However, maybe at YT scale (or more specifically Google Advert scale) the economics works? ps: I would like this discussion to focus on the absolute necessary elements (e.g., storing, encoding, streaming) and not on other factors contributing to latency/cost like running view count algorithms.