"not that expensive" is relative; it's still a lot of money. Sure, it's not trillions of dollars, but it's still billions of dollars. YouTube has historically not returned a net profit (and I haven't heard of that situation changing).
I did that for a while and then even just hearing my wife suffer through it made me upgrade to the family plan. Now I invited some other family members and we are all enjoying that premium bitrate no-ad lifestyle.
PiHole if the LG TV is an invariant. Otherwise, I believe casting from your ad blocked device should make the TV itself ad-free (Though for YT, "casting" may in face just be "using the app").
Infrastructure at scale is not as expensive as cloud vendors would have you think. Reaching scale and being a first-mover gives a significant advantage, because deploying a CDN with caches well connected with(in) every major ISP around the world takes time.
Not sure, one could say they use their dominant search position and revenue to serve video at a loss and distort the market, making it very hard for anyone without an existing money printing machine to bootstrap a profitable video site. See vimeo.
that was my assumption when i read they weren't profitable
and also that streaming and storing video at that scale is almost a natural monopoly, with how much it must cost and how hard it would be to compete without existing resources
The important question is how much can an ISP charge for a broadband without YouTube and Netflix service. They do not pay even the fractions of a penny everyone else has to.
Which would help for the crazy popular meme videos, but I bet the long tail on YouTube is insanely big, even if you did have the “watch next” engine getting in on the game steering you toward content already present in your nearby caches.
YouTube is estimated to have 1 exabyte [1] of data. Petabyte level storage is not unheard of [2], and a gateway server with 5PB storage would cover ~0.5% of all YouTube videos, which should be sufficient to serve a very high percentage of the most popular videos.
They can still afford to serve the occasional obscure video from the origin servers.
Yup! This is the reason why its so cheap for them. Other companies in similar positions have cache nodes in the ISPs and this dramatically lowers the cost
