[jedberg]

Youtube is very different than Netflix from a technical problem perspective. They serve free videos to anyone around the world that are uploaded by users.

It's closer to a live streaming problem than pre-encoded video like Netflix.

Having worked at Netflix I can say that the YouTube problem is much more complex.

[why_only_15]

I wonder what portion of Youtube's request traffic can be served with cache servers at the edge with a few hundred terabytes of storage. There's a very long tail but i would guess a significant portion of their traffic is the top ~10,000 videos at any given moment.

[spockz]

There was a Google organised hackathon on this topic. Given a set of resources, locations, and (estimated) popularity, Optimise for video load time by determining what should be moved to the cache when and where.

[skyde]

did anything from the hackathon turn out to be used?

[spockz]

I’m not sure as I don’t work at Google and didn’t see any follow up. Maybe some in the winning teams would know.

I do think there is some temporal logic already present in Google’s algorithm which wasn’t part of the challenge.