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A comment on The Fight for Patent-Unencumbered Media Codecs Is Nearly Won. Parent comment

Re:The Fight for Patent-Unencumbered Media Codecs Is Nearly Won by Whitestrake on Wednesday January 10, 2018 @07:47PM (#16120537)
For each individual video, it is a onetime CPU cost, but not a onetime bandwidth cost.

For ongoing operation of the platform, at scale, you might argue that it's an ongoing CPU cost as more and more videos are added constantly, but the bandwidth to distribute those videos goes up at an equal rate on average.

I don't know any actual numbers, but it seems very plausible to me that a vast increase in CPU cost for a minor decrease of bandwidth cost could still be a welcome trade-off.

If you're making an argument that availability of CPU power at that scale is a concern, it seems like YouTube has the option of Google's cloud services as an excellent candidate for massive, interruptible compute power.

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Re:The Fight for Patent-Unencumbered Media Codecs Is Nearly Won by ZeroGravitas on Thursday January 11, 2018 @05:06AM (#16122654)
It's not just bandwidth cost. Google suggests their big win with VP9 deployment is reaching people across the globe with relatively powerful computers but terrible internet connections. By using more powerful compression (paying for it with more computing work at both ends) they can get higher quality video to these users.

And from a blunt business perspective: Higher quality videos = more watch time = platform dominance = more ads viewed.

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Re:The Fight for Patent-Unencumbered Media Codecs Is Nearly Won by earenndil on Friday January 12, 2018 @01:02AM (#16130727)
> vast increase in CPU cost for a minor decrease of bandwidth cost could still be a welcome trade-off

I don't think that this would be true, though. Recall the 80-20 rule. They have to encode (CPU) a lot of videos, which will get very few views (bandwidth).

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Re:The Fight for Patent-Unencumbered Media Codecs Is Nearly Won by ComputerGuru on Friday January 12, 2018 @01:22PM (#16135020)
Not really. It’s the long tail. The most popular videos are (in addition to likely being ultra resolution like vevo media’s) watched many (8-10?) orders of magnitude more times than the least popular videos. Bandwidth matters, cpu doesn’t.

It’s actually the same 80-20 rule. Eighty percent of the costs come fro serving twenty percent of their videos:)

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