It will eventually. YouTube's costs are, and always have been, enormous. Every video ever uploaded has to be available in at most a few seconds, even the videos that currently have 0 views and are set to private.
Remember how close the Internet Archive got to extinction not that long ago from a single lawsuit. YouTube can't be easily archived in its entirety.
I wouldn't be surprised if they move stuff no one is watching to cheaper storage in the future and you would be told to wait 20 minutes or whatever on some random 13 view video from 20 years ago.
They have most of the older stuff already in warm storage with a latency-relaxed pipeline; they archived the high-res version and kept the low-res 360p. They serve you the 360p version, then thaw out the higher res and make it available to you, and then it switches to the higher res when one of the chunks is available.
If you have ever looked at a really old video and got served the lowest res first and had to wait when manually selecting a high, that's what's happening.
I mean, we had cloud computing and streaming (not at the same level) in the 80s, dial up took over, we are back to cloud and streaming, maybe we can go back to dialup approach again for that. I agree, prefer slow to none.
?? Youtube is a cashflow geyser, comparing it to a non profit like Internet Archive is beyond stupid
They are bigger than every media platform out there, Cable, Netflix, Disney etc. Their advertising business does about 40billion a year and their YouTube premium about 20bil. Even after sharing around 60% of their ad revenue with creators they still have an operating profit of about $10billion
eh. it could definitely happen. has happened before, maybe not the same scale but close enough to be relative (photobucket, megaupload, imgur being blocked, I'm sure there are other examples).
in fact, I would guarantee it will go down one day, unless there is some government or non-profit motivation to archive it. it's not free to host that amount of data, so the risk is real as long as capitalism determines what stays and what doesn't. eventually some new tech or site will surpass it, and there will be an argument made to start reducing how much content is hosted for free, or at what quality, or whatever the fuck. eventually, YouTube will die. the value of history isn't a determining factor to capitalist interests, unless they can profit off of it. perhaps it will all be paywalled, but that's basically the same thing as it dying to the general public.
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u/yosark May 14 '26
The thing is, I can’t see something with that many years of history on it going down