Why not? The cost of 50GB of live storage is not that high anymore. Doesn't gmail provide something like that much now already?
If you upload data and no one ever downloads it then there only has to be one copy in one datacenter on the entire internet, which not very expensive. And if you upload data that tons of people are accessing all over the place, they'll have to cache it closer to the destination and that will cost money, but then it generates ad revenue and pays for itself.
Moreover, I don't think anyone with a brain will be using it as a backup solution for anything important, because I highly doubt they'll provide you any kind of service level agreement. It's almost the opposite of a backup: If you upload something then it highly likely gets distributed to the world, but if they have a serious hardware failure (or have another encounter with corrupt law enforcement officials) then your data might go away at random sometime and have to be re-uploaded.
Can MEGA really be free for e.g. tens of millions using a few GB of bandwidth/month to backup their video diary logging?
That is not an unrealistic scenario in a few years.
(I'd do backup to MEGA for my personal stuff, if I could at the same time use a couple of similar (free) services in parallel. Then lack of 100% dependability isn't a problem.)
It doesn't have to be. Uploading that much data would take upwards of 900 hours (!) on my fairly-typical residential cable connection (18m down/128k up). Those of us without fiber at home will never come close.
Why not? The cost of 50GB of live storage is not that high anymore. Doesn't gmail provide something like that much now already?
If you upload data and no one ever downloads it then there only has to be one copy in one datacenter on the entire internet, which not very expensive. And if you upload data that tons of people are accessing all over the place, they'll have to cache it closer to the destination and that will cost money, but then it generates ad revenue and pays for itself.
Moreover, I don't think anyone with a brain will be using it as a backup solution for anything important, because I highly doubt they'll provide you any kind of service level agreement. It's almost the opposite of a backup: If you upload something then it highly likely gets distributed to the world, but if they have a serious hardware failure (or have another encounter with corrupt law enforcement officials) then your data might go away at random sometime and have to be re-uploaded.