Why does "Youtube" keep having to "stream"?

[Antx777]

Hello,

Everytime I go on youtube, and whether i press the back button, read comments or what ever, it has to stream AGAIN, even though it's already in my temp file!, its ok, but just on 1 meg Tiscali here, and slows everything down when i go back to whatever i was watching.



Just wondering


~Ant

 

[Ed]

Every addressed request is a unique call (tagged URL's I believe) to the movie which forces a server call, not a cached one. The cost of bandwidth must be frightening.

 

[Antx777]

Oh, cheers

 

[GarethDW]

The Wall Street Journal did a piece on YouTube a couple of years back that is an interesting read...

http://online.wsj.com/public/articl...6RfVfz9NwLk774VUWc_20070829.html?mod=rss_free

I did a scrape of YouTube a month ago and found there were 5.1 million videos. By Sunday, the end of another scrape, that number had grown by about 20% to 6.1 million. Because we know how many videos have been uploaded to the site, the length of each, and how many times it has been watched (total views were 1.73 billion as of Sunday) we can do a little multiplication to find out how much time has collectively been spent watching them.

...

YouTube videos take up an estimated 45 terabytes of storage -- about 5,000 home computers' worth -- and require several million dollars' worth of bandwidth a month to transmit.

...

70% of YouTube's registered users are American and roughly half are under 20 years of age. The oldest active viewer apparently is geriatric1927, a 79-year old U.K. resident who sits at his PC in his study with headphones on and narrates memories of World War II. Ernie Rogers, a 23-year old from Colton, Calif., whose handle is "lamo1234," has watched more YouTube videos than anyone. Mr. Rogers claims he is on the site 24/7.

Imagine how much that's all changed in the 2 years since that article was published

 

[Ice Rich]

YouTube videos take up an estimated 45 terabytes of storage -- about 5,000 home computers' worth

Surealy that math is wrong?

That would mean each home computer user had 110'ish mb of space? i.ehardly anything?

 

[titchard]

YouTube videos take up an estimated 45 terabytes of storage -- about 5,000 home computers' worth

Surealy that math is wrong?

That would mean each home computer user had 110'ish mb of space? i.ehardly anything?

Nope, but it is a bit low.

1024 * 45 = 46080GB

46080 / 5000 = 9.2GB a PC

Rich

 

[Hawk Tuah]

Do they really cover that amount of investment in bandwidth with advertising.

 

[[TR]SweetSpotOz]

x

 

[Ed]

Do they really cover that amount of investment in bandwidth with advertising.

YouTube and the original venture capitalist company didn't, but Google do. I don't think it's an earner for them though, it's all to do with monopolisation of markets which adds to the brand as a whole.

 

[amkan13]

YouTube and the original venture capitalist company didn't, but Google do. I don't think it's an earner for them though, it's all to do with monopolisation of markets which adds to the brand as a whole.

youtube is loss making. the only reason it exists is branding and market share.