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> Of course this is also fantastically expensive to build and maintain

"Fantastically expensive" is quite the claim.

Google won't tell us, but how much do we think it actually costs to operate it?

Quite a bit? You have a lot of videos, most of which in many formats, often up to 4k. Storage alone likely costs a few pennies (if not more).

Then all the network traffic (a sizable fraction of the entire internet traffic), transcoding & upkeep for all these things. That's only VoD.

Then there's live video which is basically the entire thing above with the additional constraint that there's less room for error and latency.

Some other services tried live video as well, e.g. Netflix or Apple for some keynotes in the past.

YouTube gets 4.3Petabytes of data every day.

To just receive, transmit and store that in AWS S3, just one day's worth of data is - 317 thousand dollars.

That's literally doing nothing other than transmission and storage. Just that.

That's a surprisingly small amount, it would mean that a year of video is only 1.5 EiB. IIRC google has like hundreds of EiB in storage.