[tetrazine]

Well. Videos are orders of magnitude larger than many other common web content formats. And there are probably several codecs available on a CDN. It's reasonable to call that expensive and still claim that cloud computing is cheap overall. It is amazing to store gigs of photos for cents per month on AWS.

But I would guess bandwidth dwarfs storage costs here, so it does seem odd.

[Cpoll]

But that's another good point, if you're storing multiple encodings, storing a single backup is less than double the cost, because you only need to back-up one encoding.

Slow-to-retrieve backup services like S3 Glacier are usually much cheaper, too.