Billion dollar costs aren’t rounding errors even at YouTube/Google’s scale. They’re a measurable percentage of total revenue. I agree that it slightly improves the user experience, it’s hard to imagine a worse cost/benefit tradeoff from an engineering perspective even at more realistic costs. It’s especially hard to justify when there’s an easy alternative for users in the form of downloading videos.
Even if it was 3 cents in bandwidth (it’s not), that’s 1.3 billion dollars in additional costs. You want more ads to pay for that?
And thats probably a rounding error in googles costs.
For a much more usable, enjoyable experience.
That you’re arguing against, because wont someone think of poor googles downtrodden finances.
Billion dollar costs aren’t rounding errors even at YouTube/Google’s scale. They’re a measurable percentage of total revenue. I agree that it slightly improves the user experience, it’s hard to imagine a worse cost/benefit tradeoff from an engineering perspective even at more realistic costs. It’s especially hard to justify when there’s an easy alternative for users in the form of downloading videos.