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Comment by londons_explore

1 year ago

> As an aside, hats off to Google to being able to serve an 11 year old video with no noticeable delay from what must be the coldest of caches.

And remember that depending if you visited with an iphone, or an android, or a smart TV, or a Chromecast, they'd be needing to serve the video with different encoding settings/codecs/MPEG profiles. So for the hardly ever watched videos, they either need to keep transcoded copies in 10+ formats, all ready to serve with no latency for years, or be ready to live transcode.

It really amazes me that they don't simply say that any video that doesn't get at least 1000 views will count towards your google drive storage quota.

Keeping all that private and never watched video ready-to-serve must cost so much, with zero revenue.

  • I think they will/are using it for AI/ML training. After all, it is data created by a human, so useful in the newly polluted sea of AI generated content.

    • Doubt data uploaded 10+ years ago has the necessary agreements in place, at least in countries like Europe/UK requiring user consent for processing of private data.

      Collecting data for one purpose (video sharing site), but then using it for another (training AI) is very much verboten.

      They can probably use the public stuff tho.

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