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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

Bandwidth costs all video sites a lot.

Thats why cloudflare won't host sites with lots of video. It's why twitter doesn't do HD video. Thats why there are no startups trying to make video hosting sites.

If you hosted a youtube clone on AWS with their cloudfront CDN, you'd be paying $0.085 per GB out to the internet. A youtube ad view earns perhaps $0.004. HD video is ~6GB/hour, so a 3 minute video costs $0.0255 to host (before compute and storage costs, profit and engineer time).

Earning $0.004 for something that costs you $0.025 is never going to work out...

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I don't like this reasoning because I've seen the inside of google. Their bandwidth is very cheap.

What costs is having a CDN, a bunch of very fast servers that exist in every point-of-presence, given the load they endure CDN cache servers fail quickly when compared to others. -- along with the upkeep of their networking equipment, which is cheap but not free.

But Google itself has invested wisely in how it connects to the internet, they are dark fibre all the way with many hundreds of gigabits between sites and pops. It's a huge upfront investment (the kind SV startups seem to hate) but the long tail makes bandwidth essentially free.

The only cost they have is hardware and peering, and given their size I can't convince myself if they are or are not being shafted financially by big ISPs for peering - even if they are though, it's marginal compared to what GCP/AWS/etc; charge us, even Colo datacenters will charge significantly more than what it costs Google.

Thanks, this is exactly what I was wondering about. I would expect Google's marginal cost of bandwidth to be approximately zero. What are networks going to do, not connect to Google?

> What are networks going to do, not connect to Google?

Throttle the connection so its slow enough users get 480p video at peak viewing times. Ask google for $$$$ to stop doing that.

And to be clear this is literally what happened to Netflix and I think YouTube and a few other sites in the pre-Net Neutrality days. Of course we don't have Net Neutrality anymore either, so presumably Google is paying ISPs not to throttle, or ISPs are content with the 1TB/month cap they tend to have.

Also, that 1TB/month cap is just foot-in-the-door technique. It will stay 1TB or so as videos, games, websites, etc. continue to get larger and larger and then they will lean on Appeal to Tradition (logical fallacy) when people complain that 1TB/month isn't adequate.

Google can just say ‘if you’re on this network, you only get poor quality video. Come to one of the networks that support YouTube properly!’.

Remember that for a while they were just about the only site that could load Flash. YouTube is that important.

Most places in the US at least have two ISPs at most so it would probably not pan out so well if they tried to do that

That kind of reminds me of the Monty Python skit where two mafiosi try to shake down the army. Why in the world would Google pay up? Your average ISP needs YouTube to work well far more than Google needs one ISP.

German ISP Telekom is notorious for shenanigans like this, which is why I boycott them.

What is google's cost for PB of bandwidth in EU/USA?

Google to Google? Next to €0.

I should also note that Google will send data from their DCs over dark fibre to their PoPs near you, so they only transit onto the internet locally.

Even despite that, they still have no interest in encouraging "freeloading"

Key words are "would cost _you_". The providers get much better cost per GB at scale, then sell to you at a profit.

For example, transfer out from S3 gets down to $0.05 at just 150TB, including the AWS markup.

(Note that CloudFront data out is not directly comparable to S3 data out!)

> Thats why there are no startups trying to make video hosting sites.

No, there are no startups in video for the same reason there were no startups in office apps or operating systems in the 2000s, a subsidized 500lb gorilla in the space.

The problem with a video startup is that you have to charge for your content. And some jerk will download your video, post it to YouTube, and distribute it for free.

If YouTube were forced to stand on its own instead of being subsidized by the Google advertising maw, we'd see innovation in the space.

Until YouTube gets broken out from Google by anti-trust action, the video startup space will continue to remain dead.

The big cloud providers all charge ridiculous amounts for their bandwidth. It makes your numbers completely invalid for any bandwidth-focused operation.

Also youtube's bitrate usually far below that amount.

Not to distract from your point, but

> It's why twitter doesn't do HD video.

Twitter does HD video. I don't know whether it is generally available or not, but for example, Tucker Carlson's videos are 1080p.

Interesting description: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FpAOeoZWAAM-iHV?format=png&name=...

Though Cloudflare does have a separate product for streaming Video, it definitely doesn’t fall under the generic CDN serving files model

Yes, I get that I have to pay a lot for bandwidth. And that you have to pay a lot for bandwidth.

My question is specifically about YouTube.

This looks to me like a sane comment. No idea why this was downvoted.

Because it doesn't answer the question. I was asking about YouTube, which, being part of Google, occupies a radically different position. They aren't using AWS to host their video, so the numbers are irrelevant.

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