It might not be that hard to store. A lot of Youtube videos are just filler, you wouldn’t want your instance to store massive amounts of mixtape videos for example, neither would you want to store 10 different encodings of the same video. On the flip-side, you can get 20TB drives easily enough if you have the pipe to run the server locally; and distributed storage makes it more feasible to use consumer grade hardware that’s more prone to failure.
It might not be that hard to store. A lot of Youtube videos are just filler, you wouldn’t want your instance to store massive amounts of mixtape videos for example, neither would you want to store 10 different encodings of the same video. On the flip-side, you can get 20TB drives easily enough if you have the pipe to run the server locally; and distributed storage makes it more feasible to use consumer grade hardware that’s more prone to failure.