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.
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.