This month, Credit Suisse published a detailed analysis of YouTube's business, estimating that the site will lose approximately $470 million in 2009, as the costs of bandwidth and storage to stream more than 5 billion clips a month far exceed the revenue YouTube earns from advertising.
It is quickly using cash to pay for the bandwidth and storage needs of the exploding user base abroad.
Most P2P live streaming systems divide video stream into fine-grained blocks, and paralleled distribute these blocks in overlay network to utilize the bandwidth and storage resources of end users, which improves the scalability.
As video sites on the Web struggle to find a business model that will pay their mounting bandwidth and storage bills, many of them are trying to reinvent themselves.
Like so many cloud services, it is a possibility now because of improvements in bandwidth and storage capacity, not because of any magical new powers possessed by MacBook Airs.
The ability to interpret remote sensing data on-board can significantly reduce the amount of bandwidth and storage space needed in the generation of science products.
As it is now, the cost of processing, bandwidth and storage is falling but instead of consumers benefiting from this trend by having access to cost efficient digital entertainment products for less, the copyright cartel is making sure that the price for all entertainment goes the way of cable TV and inflation in general; higher.
Add bandwidth and storage costs on top of that, which aren't trivial for services that want to stream music quickly on demand.
Then there are the costs of running such a site video requires a lot of bandwidth and storage.
The self-interest of the companies owning the sites, which know that the crackers will use above-average amounts of bandwidth and storage (indeed, that's almost the metric for finding cracked stuff on one of those sites: investigate the busiest, most demanding users).
