this video might not be the biggest but it could easily be the most unnecessary
risk of my career the smart play for me would have been to jump onto the hate
bandwagon anger cells and the internet
is pretty freaking angry about the premium pay wall that YouTube has been
experimenting with on 4K videos but that
would have been a huge disservice to our community so instead of doing that I've
spent the last few days thinking about it a lot and you know what I'm still
pretty frustrated I mean no one likes being given something only to have it
taken away later and no one likes feeling powerless in the face of an
entity with the power and resources of Google as a full-time YouTuber trust me
I feel that but I've also come to realize that this might be a necessary
move if we want to preserve the good things about this platform really good
things like the world's largest free repository of independent news media
educational resources and cultural expression good things like this segue
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following the link in the description before you even say it I am no corporate
bootlicker over the past year I have gone to the mat with YouTube a lot more
times than I've taken their side notably over the utter incompetence of their
comment moderation efforts their removal of the dislike counter and the way that
their half effort HDR implementation has literally held back the entire video
production industry but in this case once I calmed down a little I was able
to start putting together the pieces and we're going to start with the biggest
and the most obvious one cost since 2007
the amount of content per minute uploaded to YouTube has grown
exponentially and it's common knowledge that data centers are expensive and the
more data you serve the more data centers you need but as scary as this
trend line already looks with that in mind it doesn't even begin to tell the
whole story first of all it doesn't account for the size of the video files
being uploaded back in 2007 digital cameras were relatively rare and the
ones that we had recorded at pretty low resolutions anywhere from 240p to 480p
that means a typical minute of video would take up a trifling 35 megab or so
and that was the highquality source file
no big deal then right especially since YouTube can re-encode those uploaded
files and serve them at a lower bit rate to save on both storage and bandwidth
costs but let's fast forward a bit to 5
years later in 2012 not only had the
sheer volume of video uploaded to the platform increased 10 fold but HD 720p
video recording was available on commodity smartphones with the latest
Ione phones capable of full HD 1080p that puts our typical minute of
footage at anywhere from 75 to 100 megabytes through compression we can
still probably cut our storage and hosting costs in half but even if just
say 40% of new uploads are in HD now and
I don't know 10% or in 1080P corrected
for video size our bar graph will start to look a little bit like whoa uh a
problem except it actually wasn't at
least not yet YouTube's user base and their revenue also increased
dramatically during this time meaning that even if they weren't making money
on it yet Google could easily justify the ongoing investment into their video
serving side hustle and besides it didn't hurt that every time Google built
a new data center it was cheaper and more efficient than the last one in just
3 years from 2009 to 2012 mechanical
storage drives went from a cost per Gigabyte of 11 cents to just 5
that's less than half the price Mo's law to the rescue again right uh about that
to be clear not everyone agrees with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Wong but even Mo's
Law's most stalwart Defenders have to admit that things have been slowing down
for a while let's Jump Ahead another 3 years to demonstrate to
2015 even ignoring the pricing anomaly that was caused by the Thailand floods
storage drives fell only about 25% this
this time around there are a number of reasons for this but the main issue is
that it has become extremely difficult to pack zeros and ones more densely on
the spinning magnetic platters inside these devices to be clear there are
still cost savings to be had by running fewer higher capacity drives and filling
them with helium gas and whatnot but those efficiency gains are nothing
compared to the data bomb that was about to be Unleashed on YouTube 2015 was the
first year the I phone would come standard with a 4K rear camera and 4K is
a very different kind of Beast compared to anything that came before it with
four times the pixel count and very nearly four times the data rate I
suspect that the only thing that saved Google servers from immediately Lighting
on fire is that Apple configured the camera app on that generation of iPhone
to record in 1080p by default likely not out of consideration for their bit Ral
but rather because the base model iPhone 6s could hold about 40 minutes of 4K
footage total and also maybe because except under very specific conditions
you could barely even tell the difference between 1080P and 4K video
that was recorded on that phone anyway I'm going to get into more detail about
that later the point is that even if only 10% of video uploads transitioned
to 4K per year over the next few years YouTube would need to find some way to
grow their revenue or they could risk becoming nonviable obviously they kept up with
their their efforts to grow the user base with big pushes in non-english-speaking regions like India
and Latin America but by 3 years later
the end of 2018 YouTube had nearly cracked 2 billion with a B monthly
active users so unless they started up
some kind of diabolical program where they actually started breeding more
people to consume content on their platform it was pretty clear that their
days of exponential user growth were well behind them they needed to find
another way to get profitable and do it fast or daddy Google excuse me Alphabet
by this point was going to do what they do best and pull the plug enter YouTube
premium sure it did exist before this
but it wasn't until around this time that YouTube started pushing the program
hard they've tried various ways to add value to premium over the years through
original content background playback and bundles with Google Play music Rip but
of course the main attraction has always been the removal of ads how could they
afford to remove the ads you might ask well because even for a data mining
advertising machine like Google a paid user even for just a few dollar a month
is worth way more than an ad supported user like it is bloody hard to make
money on free tier ad supported content
I mean Twitter took nearly a decade to have a single profitable year and they
serve almost exclusively still images and text which isn't to say Google
hasn't tried since then you've probably noticed that ads have gone from simple
popups in the videos and pre-rolls to popups pre-rolls mid rolls and end rolls
some of which are stacked with two or more on top of each other and a recent
trial had Google piling up as many as 10 ads during a single content break
yikes and this strategy of packing in more ads has served them pretty well
with Revenue growth finally turning a corner over the last couple years
outpacing user growth significantly the problem is that it's not enough look at
the user upload Trend and remember that unless they start deleting old videos
they need to store all of the previous year's uploads as well oh right and Over
The Last 5 Years hard drive prices have essentially bottomed out following only
about 1 cent per Gigabyte making matters
worse storage is only part of the problem on our video platform float
plane 4K playback makes up only about 6%
of our views but over 20% of the total
bandwidth that we have to pay for and while it's harder to dig up solid
historical data for this compared to hard drive costs it is clear that there
has been a stagnation in bandwidth costs as well that is to say they're not
getting lower how bad is it well to the
point where Google went as far as to co-found the alliance for open media in
2015 AO media is a Consortium whose main
purpose so far has been to create and Foster industry support for av1 a video
code that manages similar 1080p visual quality to h264 while requiring only a
little over half the data transmission or bit rate ah bit rate I said I would
talk in more detail about other factors that affect image quality and now is the
time the second reason that I believe this move makes sense is that serving up
more pixels isn't necessarily the best
way to improve the user's experience and this focus on how many P's or KS a video
has has contributed to a ton of consumer
confusion about it for starters pixel count is one contributor to the
resolution or the perceived Clarity of an image but it is not the entire
equation everything else is important too from shot composition to color
management to contrast and natural bokeh
don't believe me well here's a video I ripped off from this guy Marquez Keith
brownley in HD that looks pretty good
for 1080p right for comparison here's
some 4K video but from a cell phone it's
tiny sensor low bit rate internal recording mediocre dynamic range blocky
processing and poor image stabilization all contribute to the blurry ugly
viewing experience that you see before you so then while there are absolutely
creators on YouTube who invest heavily into their production values and whose
videos are best enjoyed with more pixels I think it's fair to say that they're a
minority and I also think it's fair to say the same for users who reason number
three mostly don't actually need 4K I
know I know like you I want to use the
most advanced platforms and get the absolute most out of my devices and
services be they gigabit plus internet connections or 8K TVs but please hear me
out while I don't support everything that Apple does I wholeheartedly support
their use of retina branding to describe displays that are Sharp enough from a
typical viewing distance regardless of their pixel count they rightly
determined years ago that unless you happen to be a bird of prey you not only
do not need a 4K display on your phone but the tradeoffs in cost brightness and
power consumption could actually make it a
disadvantage that means that right out of the gate 43% of you watching right
now straight up do not need 4K moving on
the latest Steam Hardware survey shows that 4k monitor penetration is at
roughly 15% while these numbers from Statia Peg 4K TVs at about
44% almost all tablets top out at around
1440p and again rightly so meaning that
at most even if you have 2020 Vision
only about 10% of you actually have the hardware to benefit from a 4K stream
option well sort of one of the main
benefits of YouTube's 4K selector is that pixel count aside it streams at a
much higher bit rate than 1080p so in
Practical terms that means that it has fewer compression art effects like
bending or blocking so that even if you're watching in a small window you
can often make out extra detail in the image but the good news is that 1440p
offers a middle ground High bit rate option and isn't on the free tier
chopping block at least for now and even if it was I think there's a solid non-4k
solution to that going forward it ties in nicely with reason number four
juicing more and more pixels through the pipes it's just plain bad inefficient
Tech once you've got enough pixels a better way to boost perceived Clarity is
to bump up color saturation and contrast that's where HDR comes in there's still
some work to do on this but the word on this treat is that YouTube has been
investing significant resources into fixing their HDR implementation which
also won't be paywalled and will result in much higher quality 1080p video with
a much more modest increase in data rate another area where I think YouTube could
stand to redirect these 4K payall savings is audio quality I mean sure
it's not as headline worthy as 4K or 8K
or whatever but audio is hugely important especially for music videos
which last time I checked are kind of a big deal on YouTube Google's lasay Fair
approach to improving audio has been a point of confus Fusion for me for a long
time and is actually one of the main drivers that brought garbage time
streams over to our in-house video streaming platform Flo plane which by
the way charges extra for 4K cuz it's
expensive but it's also pretty sweet with loads of behind the scenes and
Extras like this one go check it out Floatplane.com to be clear there's a
big difference between what we did charging for 4K in the first place and
the bait and switch that Google is pulling here and Google has no one to
blame but for the backlash that they are undoubtedly going to get for this move
this Silicon Valley money furnace don't
worry we'll figure out how to make money later model has always seemed pretty
short-sighted to me but the numbers make it clear that even if this causes a big
PR hit and it will something has to give
but I have to at least give YouTube credit for sticking to its core
principles when it comes to supporting creators through the change unlike
twitch who recently announced a change in Creator compensation YouTube isn't
just cutting costs and pocketing the difference they also aren't taking away
Creator ability to upload their videos in the highest possible quality for
those who want it what they're doing is they're identifying an area where they
can cut their costs to support non-paying customers convert a chunk of
those into paying customers and then share this uplift with their creators
which is reason number five that this makes sense a view from a premium
subscriber is worth substantially more than an ad supported view while also
being a better lower friction experience all around and this move is going to
drive more revenue for creators and therefore drive more highquality content
to the YouTube platform YouTube's position as the most desirable place for
online creators to be is no accident they were so far ahead of the
competition on this that no one even now has managed to catch up I mean think
about it a aside from having crap TI your video quality Tik Tok sucks at
compensating creators oh yeah if you go like live on there they take 80% of like
if if people people tip or anything like
that they'll take 80% of it you can expect the Exodus shortly after shorts
monetization goes live next year and I already mentioned twitch which rewards
its top tier creators pretty well but then completely falls apart once you
start looking at anything beyond the top 1% and then there's Facebook who managed
to rug pull a whole gener ation of starting out content creators by
focusing hard on video and investing a bunch of money then bailing just as hard
when the Zuck first joined VR chat and decided to how Hugh that shiz and so
that's the real reason why YouTube keeps getting worse and you keep watching it
because it's where all the content is so
if I'm in YouTube's shoes I'm going he this thing cost us a fortune most people
don't really need it and some of our most successful creators don't even use
it pay Walling 4K is kind of an obvious move but even after hearing all of this
I can totally understand if you might conclude that Google makes so much money
they should just suck it up and pay like they said they would the thing is though
even if you think that they could pay and they should pay they won't pay why
not you ask well why don't I turn that back around on you and ask why would
they the best possible argument I can
think of for them to just keep eating this cost that is literally trending
Skyward to a vertical line is it would
be the good guy thing to do but Google has never done anything out of the
goodness of their hearts so why would you expect them to start now maybe it's
just time for the semiannual reminder that publicly held corporations Will
Always by law act in their own self-interest and in the interest of
their shareholders so we are left with a harsh Choice then keep the truly
important things about YouTube and subsidize them through a small
percentage of users you know the ones with 4K monitors and TVs or open
ourselves up to other much worse cost cutting measures I mean what if the
alternative is to start pruning old videos and we have to give up that
library of rarely watched content that you might need someday when it's time to
repair the Obscure washing machine you inherited from your Aunt Freda some
people might feel that just adding more ads is a viable path forward but I
honestly disagree I think we've reached a practical limit to how many ads
YouTube can cram into a video so the revenue growth isn't going to come from
there the av1 codec that I talked about before is more efficient and it helps
with storage in ways that I didn't anticipate that could actually Merit a
follow-up video but it comes with new costs particularly computational ones so
it's not magic meaning that if this pay
Walling 4K is what it takes to drive enough premium users that we can kick
this data crisis a few more years down the road then I guess I'll just make
some demands like hey at least boost the 1080p bit rate while you're ated or hey
you should make 4K available to channel members who don't also have premium but
the reality of it is whether YouTube listens or not I'm going to lie down and
take it and so will you if you're being honest YouTube is essentially a monopoly
at this point and there's not a lot we can do about it it's not bad though it's
also one of the Bonafide Wonders of the World in my opinion and I for one live
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about black holes to fix my washing machine and allows me to tell you about
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you guys enjoyed this video or maybe you didn't and you'd rather watch me tear a
chunk out of YouTube uh you can check out one of our recent more ranty videos
about their changes like uh the one when they removed the dislike counter