Yt for example deletes your 720p after a while and replaces it with a potato.
And if you watch a old not relevant yt and it starts after 10 seconds instead of now, no one really cares.
You can put that old highly encoded potato at your huge and cheap storage system de located somewhere around the globe were it's just cheap (energy).
You can also calculate in the time for a band robot and only store half or the first minute of that potato on your cheap storage and let the robot grab the rest of it.
After all if video is your main thing plenty of weird optimizations start to make sense.
Tape is for long term sunk storage, not cold infrequent access like a youtube video.
I know aws glacier has an "expedited retrieval time" of 1-5 minutes, but that is not how typical tape setups work. Frankly I would be very interested in what actually hides behind that product.
You can tell this is the case for at least the flexible retrieval tier, because small objects can be returned in a few minutes, whereas larger requests take hours - if the files were actually on a tape drive somewhere, small requests couldn't be fulfilled dramatically faster than large ones, given that tape has shitty random-access performance.
(I used to work on a downstream team at AWS)
It's also weird that the retrieval gives you a regular fast S3 object you can then access. Given that it's already on that hardware, is a copy even happening?
always bugs me to hell when i encounter a "high definition" video that has worse quality than pal/ntsc
But no, always goes to spinny wheel buffering after ad ends. Oh, and thats after having some spinny wheel to load the ad in first place ffs.
They are definitely not fetching video in the background.