{"id":425,"date":"2006-06-15T12:01:22","date_gmt":"2006-06-15T18:01:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=425"},"modified":"2006-06-15T12:01:22","modified_gmt":"2006-06-15T18:01:22","slug":"because_we_can","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=425","title":{"rendered":"Because we can"},"content":{"rendered":"

“When we say we want all the world\u2019s video, we really do want all the world\u2019s video.” So says Google’s Hunter Walk in an interview<\/a> with Beet TV. Beet’s Andy Plesser, noting that YouTube and Yahoo limit video uploads to 100 megabytes, comments: “We were stunned to hear from Hunter that Google Video DOES NOT LIMIT THE LENGTH OF FILE SIZE … The implications of this are enormous. It boggles the mind to consider the amount of storage needed for such an undertaking.” Not only that, but Google encourages<\/a> people to upload video in the highest quality (ie, largest size) possible: “The higher the quality of the video you can provide to Google Video, the better your video will look on our site!”<\/p>\n

Now even granting that we’d all like to see more of such Top 100<\/a> Google videos as Fart on TV<\/a>, Caged & Feathered<\/a>, I’m the Juggernaut Bitch<\/a> and the #1 Girl Caught Cheating<\/a>, the storage and bandwidth requirements for handling unlimited amounts of video do indeed boggle the mind. It certainly explains that new Columbia River powerplant<\/a> (maybe “dataplant” is a better term).<\/p>\n

But to what end? Can somebody tell me, with a straight face, the economic, social or cultural justification for “wanting all the world’s video”? Sure, Google and YouTube are encouraging people to invest huge amounts of time in producing and consuming silly fart and tickle videos, but how many silly fart and tickle videos does the world really need? A petabyte worth? A yottabyte? Whatever the ideal amount is, I think we’re probably nearly there – though I suppose once you push the price of silly fart and tickle videos to zero, demand scales to infinity.<\/p>\n

No, the only explanation I can see is some newfangled form of megalomania, fed by a messianic ideology, a mountain of cash and too little sleep.<\/p>\n

UPDATE: Ian Betteridge says<\/a> it’s all to feed the AI. And he’s probably right.<\/p>\n

UPDATE 2: Chris Gulker guesstimates<\/a> that Google is currently serving 2,000 users per server. Anybody have a sense of what effect storing, searching and streaming all the world’s video would have on the company’s computing requirements?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“When we say we want all the world\u2019s video, we really do want all the world\u2019s video.” So says Google’s Hunter Walk in an interview with Beet TV. Beet’s Andy Plesser, noting that YouTube and Yahoo limit video uploads to 100 megabytes, comments: “We were stunned to hear from Hunter that Google Video DOES NOT […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=425"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}