The 'Hyperinflation' in Hardware Dooms Video Hosting (Very Large Files)
During the second Coronavirus lockdown, coinciding with Christmastime in 2020, we began producing lots of videos. There was a lot of time and not a lot to do (most things outdoors or "out there" were unavailable or barely available). I remember shops where you had to walk along arrows to do "shopping"... so much 'fun'!!!
On the first day of April 2024, several months after COVID-19 finally 'caught us', we began a long streak in Blackpool - a weekly ritual of hot beverages. Last year we made changes in order to improve our diet and do more exercise. Food prices have increased over the years (some items have literally more than doubled in price since COVID-19 began) and prices of some hardware - storage devices in particular - more than trebled in 1-2 years. One thing it impacts is hosting costs, set aside personal computers. The majority of the disk space we use is occupied by videos; some are larger than a gigabyte (for a single video) and when we began this in 2020 storage and computers were in general quite cheap. If we added 100GB in videos every year, or half a terabyte in half a decade, it would add up not just in terms of bandwidth but also server space and off-site backups. While our community helps foot the bill (or some bills), for multi-terabyte (in storage) hosting one would have to spend a lot of money. The economics of video hosting changed a lot. We've seen no site spreading the word about this...
Making daily or even just weekly videos is feasible (sometimes I long for the days I did this 2-3 times per day), but a terabyte of video files would be expensive to host and back up. This is why, for the time being, we don't consider going back to video form. We do not revisit IPFS because - rightly or wrongly - it became associated with unlawful things. █
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