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YouTube “Let's Play”s are preserving video game history

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Re: YouTube “Let's Play”s are preserving video game history

#31

Post by adrianN »

cobookman wrote: post #11
velcrovan wrote: post #3

Does YouTube have any incentive to “preserve” anything once it costs them more money than it brings in? If not, maybe it's a little early to say they are actually preserving anything. (The article does kind of acknowledge this.) Maybe its real role is as a link in a chain that leads to /r/datahoarders

You overestimate the cost of storage at this scale. It's totally worth them storing the data given the marginal cost. A 10TiB HDD is only 150$ retail. These videos can likely be stored in less than 200MiB on average. Storage has gotten cheaper YoY

There is an incredibly long tail of videos that are (almost) never watched. All those 200mb videos add up to a lot of money.

Re: YouTube “Let's Play”s are preserving video game history

#32

Post by netsharc »

zegl wrote: post #21
kibwen wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like someone to do the math on that 200MiB estimate. YouTube stores every video at multiple resolutions, and has replicas in data centers all around the world.

For low-traffic videos they likely only keep a copy in a single region.

Interestingly they could also just keep the best resolution version of rare videos, and have really powerful encoders if anyone suddenly asked for a lowres version. Then they can deliver as well as cache the lowres version in case someone else wants to look at it an hour later, but maybe drop it after a week of no access.

Re: YouTube “Let's Play”s are preserving video game history

#33

Post by mrob »

pcpie wrote: post #25
SimeVidas wrote: post #8

Until something happens to Google, and youtube.com goes down (^_^;). Can we consider any website to be permanent?

Can we consider electricity to be permanent?

Seeing as electricity is a commodity, made by many different suppliers, we can consider it much closer to "permanent" than a website existing at the whim of a single company.

Re: YouTube “Let's Play”s are preserving video game history

#34

Post by Noos »

I don't know if they are. Emulating games is not really preserving them in a sense, because it can't reproduce the hardware or experience as it actually was very well. Like you can play Ridge Racer type 4 in emulation, but part of that game's history was the special controller it was bundled with, which let you twist the middle of it to enable analog steering wheel control.

Like you can't emulate Boktai without the solar sensor on it, and also you don't get the sense of how dark the game boy advance's screen is. Or another example is Trace Memory for the Nintendo DS, which made use of the fact that the DS can close like a book (to simulate stamping on an ink pad) or that the screen is reflective when closed at an angle (to cause two screens to reflect into each other to make a single word.)

It works to show a boosted version of the original game, but something like sprite flicker or having to use passwords to continue gets dropped out. Or something like the dreamcast's VMU, which displays info on it as you play or can be used for minigames to boost the character in the main game.

The games kind of get divorced from the hardware and media they were played on, which reduces them some.

Re: YouTube “Let's Play”s are preserving video game history

#35

Post by velcrovan »

SkyBelow wrote: post #22
velcrovan wrote: post #3

Does YouTube have any incentive to “preserve” anything once it costs them more money than it brings in? If not, maybe it's a little early to say they are actually preserving anything. (The article does kind of acknowledge this.) Maybe its real role is as a link in a chain that leads to /r/datahoarders

Isn't this true of any entity? Even a Museum will eventually have to pay bills and have to decide to downsize or make changes. Even government funded preservation can have voters decide it isn't worth the costs and preservation can be dropped. I do think private companies will be the ones most fastest to drop preservation and the ones least likely to look for external entity to swap preservation with, thus making You…

Nothing lasts forever, but I still keep my milk in a refrigerator that might stop working rather than leaving it on the counter.

Re: YouTube “Let's Play”s are preserving video game history

#37

Post by chillacy »

nullandvoid wrote: post #26
SkyBelow wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this true of any entity? Even a Museum will eventually have to pay bills and have to decide to downsize or make changes. Even government funded preservation can have voters decide it isn't worth the costs and preservation can be dropped. I do think private companies will be the ones most fastest to drop preservation and the ones least likely to look for external entity to swap preservation with, thus making You…

I don't think this is a fair comparison as a museum is normally opened with the sole desire of preserving history ( Profit is often desired but not the incentive for opening ) Do you think google bought YouTube originally to preserve history or to create a new line of profit and enhance its brand?

Museums don’t own all of their collections though, and they too make decisions on what to display at any moment. Not all objects are worthy of display, some get rotated out back into some rich person’s attic.

Re: YouTube “Let's Play”s are preserving video game history

#38

Post by chillacy »

duiker101 wrote: post #27
Already__Taken wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not scanning through bulk storage like that all the time. Indexes have to be managed to be useful too which is another cost.

Videos still need to be indexed, why would Google keep the videos without indexing them?

Let’s not confuse the videos with the index of the videos. Videos can be stored on the slowest and cheapest medium, indexes might be kept in memory or flash. Each video takes hundreds of mb compressed, an entry in the index could be constant per video

Re: YouTube “Let's Play”s are preserving video game history

#39

Post by gallerdude »

I love Let's Plays, I basically grew up watching them. As a kid a little interested in video games, they gave me a lot of context of how games changed overtime (how the transition to 3D affect Mario, Sonic, and Zelda), which gradually lead me into Computer Science.

I only had a few friends as interested in video games as I was, so it was huge to see these people who knew everything about their favorite games. And most importantly, Let's Plays are really casual, the people who commentate are funny, and it feels like hanging out on someone's couch. I remember when I accompanied my mom to her spin class, I was reminded a lot of Let's Plays - the instructor would give some commentary to a shared enjoyed activity.

Re: YouTube “Let's Play”s are preserving video game history

#40

Post by the-rc »

duiker101 wrote: post #17
cobookman wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You overestimate the cost of storage at this scale. It's totally worth them storing the data given the marginal cost. A 10TiB HDD is only 150$ retail. These videos can likely be stored in less than 200MiB on average. Storage has gotten cheaper YoY

Just a few days ago there was a discussion about how Google is now indexing less contented from a years ago[1]. If Google can't keep indexes which are relatively inexpensive why should they keep videos that are more expensive and possibly no one will watch? Especially as the length and number of videos is increasing faster than ever? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19762907

The Google indices are very expensive to create and serve. For one, they use a ton of memory.

YouTube has TPMs whose only focus is making storage very cheap.

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