The video being in SD doesn’t make it free to host. YouTube still has to pay for the servers that store the videos and for delivering the video to you. And guess what! Most people don’t watch in HD and don’t even realize it.
Is it cheaper? Yeah. Is it free, no. Delivering just the audio for billions of users would cost more than most people will see in a lifetime ten times over.
You brought up specifically HD. I’m willing to watch ads so that YT can continue delivering even lower quality videos as long as those ads don’t interrupt the video.
I misunderstood your point about no ad breaks, I thought you meant no advertising at all on videos.
That said, HD was just an adjective. I can edit and remove it if you want, but the point still stands that hosting anything at YouTube’s scale is stupid expensive. Even if you cut the data load again and go down to 480p it’s still crazy expensive that requires compensation to exist.
Something like 275,000 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube daily and users watch about one billion hours daily.
The video being in SD doesn’t make it free to host. YouTube still has to pay for the servers that store the videos and for delivering the video to you. And guess what! Most people don’t watch in HD and don’t even realize it.
Is it cheaper? Yeah. Is it free, no. Delivering just the audio for billions of users would cost more than most people will see in a lifetime ten times over.
You brought up specifically HD. I’m willing to watch ads so that YT can continue delivering even lower quality videos as long as those ads don’t interrupt the video.
I misunderstood your point about no ad breaks, I thought you meant no advertising at all on videos.
That said, HD was just an adjective. I can edit and remove it if you want, but the point still stands that hosting anything at YouTube’s scale is stupid expensive. Even if you cut the data load again and go down to 480p it’s still crazy expensive that requires compensation to exist.
Something like 275,000 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube daily and users watch about one billion hours daily.