The 10 hours of video uploaded every minute to YouTube could be a problem for Google’s infrastructure. Video files are fat and people don’t want to wait long once they press play, which means keeping them requires a trade-off between fast access and cheap storage. A range of companies are trying to address these sorts of storage problems through compression, caching and even Flash memory in the data center.
But since you can’t cache everything, the recent study from Tubemogul, which shows that online videos get the most views in the first three days (with the peak demand occurring on Day Three), can help set caching policies. Dropping a video from the cache after 11 days would mean only half of the video’s viewers would be tormented with a slightly slower upload time.
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12:19 PM PT
[...] randomly go viral, it turns out). The study was recently featured in Mashable!, Alley Insider, GIGaom and elsewhere. One additional insight from the study that we hadn’t thought of is pointed out [...]
4 comments so far
10:31 AM PT
Stacy,
Video is already compressed .. and pretty nicely.
Hats off to those who thinks “zip” will do it once again :-),
and writers who would get paid less if their writeup was “compressed” to remove idiotic and redundant phrases.
12:02 PM PT
SMS, yes, video is compressed pretty nicely, but there are companies working to compress video files even more for storage. Check out Ocarina Networks or Storwize. Perhaps instead of less, I should have said more :)
12:20 PM PT
Isn’t YouTube allowing videos up to 1GB now? How is that going to play part in storage issues?
6:05 AM PT
In contrast, most broadcast TV shows are less than one-day wonders. If the networks have been erasing those video tapes and recording over them with newer episodes, then I wouldn’t blame them.
Can’t imagine that there’s much broadcast TV programing that’s worthy of archiving these days. Frankly, most is not worthy to fill the daypart slot it’s assigned in the first place.
My point: perhaps the Google infrastructure challenges pale in comparison to the apparent network TV challenges that lie ahead.
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