TL;DR; the longtail (rarely accessed images) becomes really expensive. So to save storage (and thus cost), both highly compress and dynamically generate rarely accessed images.
Plus, they mine the shit out of that data. Even if they're not earning ad revenue on it, they're tracking location, usage statistics, I wouldn't be surprised if their user agreement includes the ability to have AI "watch" the video and try to mine data about what's happening in the video the same way they mine your email to build smarter and more effective consumer profiles about you. So even with nobody watching your video, I wouldn't put it past the "G-men" to find a way to eke some profit off it.
Our automated systems analyze your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customized search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs as the content is sent, received, and when it is stored. [1]
We may have petabytes for rack, but 4K videos are coming.
wiki.c2.com/?ParkinsonsLaw
They aren't the norm, but I imagine YouTube sees a fair number of 4K uploads.
Yes, but screens increase in resolution very slowly, and you're physically limited in how much resolution you can get on a small sensor.
And video compression is improving quite impressively.
So in the end, storage is growing a lot faster than the bitrate of videos.
I'm sure there will be plenty of demand, it comes through changes in the way we use things.
Is that true? I've been pricing hard drives recently, and they seem to have stagnated for the last few years, staying at about the same price, with the best value per Gb at around 4Tb.
I thought h265 took about half the space of h264 for the same quality, but a 4k screen is actually 4x the pixels of 1080p...
So I'm guessing 4k h265 would be about double the bitrate of 1080p h264.
More importantly, don't just look at a year or two. 1080 availability is significantly more than a decade old. In fact, you should probably be comparing against 1080 mpeg-2. That gets you nearly the same bitrate between then and now. In that time hard drives have gone from ~1GB per dollar to 35GB per dollar.
And the trend is not improving much (or at all). By comparing video uploads to YouTube from last two years, the trend is roughly the same: only 1.1% of videos are in 4k [620M videos, 7M in 4k for 2016; 322M videos, 3.6M in 4k].
With 10TB drives that could be 6PB or more in a single rack.
For original photo storage which is primarily write once w/ rare if ever deletes and infrequent reads, you could potentially get by with PMR drives, further reducing the cost.
I do believe that YouTube is not hyper excited about these videos, but they do have some optimization techniques in place. For instance they don't automatically generate all possible video profiles up until they are not requested. By default they produce around 6, while very popular videos may have up to 40.