I sponsor several creators on Patreon, I don't watch early release videos because that would require me to log into Patreon and follow the link.
I've told the creators that I follow that I'm paying to enable them to do what they do, I don't need any more return than that.
I tried Nebula and others, honestly the content was either unappealing, low quality recycled material, or it took too long to find something interesting. The variety of YT is important and I'd also say 30% of my selections are based on duration, fitting the content into my lifestyle as well as my mood.
We do the same thing. There are a couple of channels we watch on YouTube who forego ads and use Patreon to fund their livelihoods; we'd be sad to see them disappear, so I started supporting them with a monthly donation on Patreon. They offer the same early release perks, but like you said, the variety of our YouTube subscription feed is important. I could binge all of these creators' videos on Patreon if I wanted to, but my wife and I aren't opening YouTube to binge just one type of video.
I was at a talk recently where a person from an ad supported streaming provider broke down their cost/revenue as part of the justification for some of their engineering decisions.
Basically you're lucky to get ad revenue of 10c per hour.
It's speculated that YT wasn't profitable long after Google acquired it as well, it's still unclear as to if stand-alone it would be profitable, without the infrastructure benefits of being part of Google.
As a guy who builds big streaming services, I can definitely say profitability is a very hard thing to achieve. Even as compute costs go down, demand for features goes up and long-tail archive costs mount.
My wife and I occasionally work while we're visiting her parents. We get away with doing teams calls at the same time on a 15/15 wireless link. Congestion only starts if our son downloads something while watching YT, while we're on calls.
It surprised me, but it works. And despite my 1125/50 connection at home, it surprised me how easy it was to adapt to lower speeds.
That being said, given the option I'd say 200/20 is my preferred minimum.
So that's be, at the least, a 7.5B fine. But I'd argue the scope of pirating over 150 million items for commercial use warrants a harsher sentence than the minimum.
I’m saying if you have an organized and sufficiently economically powered empire, along with a nearby roving band of nomads, the great wall of china becomes inevitable.
I don't see that comparison at all. Rather, I see an idea that's more akin to, "This is the sum testament to our overall technological capabilities at that time", for both YT and the Great Wall.
That's why I question whether it's actually a "miracle". I don't mean to suggest that it's not quite the feat to make something like that exist, but I see it as more of a representation of where we're at technologically, rather than some sort of improbable, inexplicable thing that otherwise shouldn't be. The fact that the response to my post seems to clearly understand how it exists kinda-sorta supports that, IMO - you can draw a clear path towards understanding how it came to be.
Every time you make a decision which increases the needed bandwidth, or device performance, you eliminate a portion of your target market for whatever you're doing.
There comes a point at which attempting to address everyone means you start making sacrifices that impact your product/offering (lowest common denominator), which itself can eliminates some higher end clients. Or you're spending so much creating multiple separate experiences that it significantly impacts the effort you have to put in and in business that hits profitability, or otherwise can cause burnout.
So, follow elegance, as well as efficiency, in the architecture and design to make it accessible to as wider audience as is practical. You have to think about what is practical, and what you're obligations are to your audience. Being thoughtful and intentional in design is no bad thing, it stops you being lazy and loading a 50MB JPEG as the backdrop when something else will do.
I've told the creators that I follow that I'm paying to enable them to do what they do, I don't need any more return than that.
I tried Nebula and others, honestly the content was either unappealing, low quality recycled material, or it took too long to find something interesting. The variety of YT is important and I'd also say 30% of my selections are based on duration, fitting the content into my lifestyle as well as my mood.