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Free storage space. I wonder how much it costs for Google to store all those 2M videos.

Here’s an idea. Encode your data/backups into a video (it’ll display as noise but that doesn’t matter). Store on YouTube for free instead of paying for terabytes on Google Drive.

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Encode your data/backups into a video

An old idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid

Store on YouTube for free instead of paying for terabytes on Google Drive.

Also been done: https://github.com/dzhang314/YouTubeDrive

I wonder what would happen if you were content struck for copyright violations on some random burst of static noise?

Nice, thanks for sharing!

at quick glance, the videos seem to be in 1.5 - 4 minute range, so taking 2.5 minutes as average, youtube-dl fetches 8 MiB. I don't know what policy does youtube use for storing lower bitrate encodings, but I figure they only keep them temporarily for some time since it was last requested and encode it live. so 2000000*8 MiB = 16 TiB, not counting whatever redundancy they have. with the 20M views that guy has got in total, they probably make more money off him than the storage/bandwidth/compute costs

They will re-encode it and it might not be reversible I guess ? Also they regularly delete videos/channels with no warning and have absolutely 0 concern about backups.

> They will re-encode it and it might not be reversible I guess?

You can encode information into the audio of video that is resistant to re-encoding.

> Also they regularly delete videos/channels with no warning and have absolutely 0 concern about backups.

You could use a level of redundancy in the videos which would resist that too, like the [2] RAID concept in hard-drive storage.

[1] https://asmp-eurasipjournals.springeropen.com/articles/10.11...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels

Thanks for the infos and sources.

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