Sure it’s old but the stats I posted in a lower comment show that at YouTube’s scale, it makes sense to store.

Yeah I replied below with actual numbers

I think you might be underestimating how many users YouTube has! According to this, 720,000 hours per day are uploaded versus 1,000,000,000 hours are watched per day!

Do you have a source? My instinct is the opposite. Compute scales with users but storage scales with videos

Are you suggesting they don’t store different versions? This suggests they do.

I believe they store and that’s why it processes lowest res first and works up

Are you wondering if one instance can be spread across multiple machines? I don’t think that’s possible and seems unnecessary. I say that because spreading users onto more instances creates less load on the larger instances, not more. Edit: I guess you can scale instances across machines!

Nice that they can control it more, but I’d bet most companies don’t want to maintain their own instance