I would be interested in knowing the financials behind this. Video is expensive to serve and store: these costs become more noticeable if they get a lot of growth of Video uploads.As much as I love HTML5 Video , it drives up your storage and transcoding costs by two to three times if decide to support WEBM, OGG and MP4(though I see they are not doing MP4). If they are transcoding the video ,then that would add to CPU costs. Of course, I am basing my assumptions of AWS, Zencoder etc. I would love to hear how to plan to contain costs.
Wikipedia currently holds a huge amount of storage and data, while it will be a lot of work for them to support videos, I assume they thought of the costs before hand.
Also, the true cost of videos isn't storing them in two formats, it's the various qualities, such as if I upload a 1080p and it gets converted to 480, 720, and 1080 for streaming.
I totally agree: the costs are number of formats supported times number of streaming resolutions supported. One video could potentially eat up 1 Gb of storage , if we add up all the formats- resolutions combination. (I am assuming that they will have multiple copies of the same video in different qualities. ) Plus transcoding and costs. A comparative text article might be stored and served at a fraction of the video costs.
I am sure Wikipedia has some of the brightest minds and they have thought about these numbers. I want to know what their analysis is for my own edification.
That makes sense, it would be nice to see what they're planning - how they plan - to support the new videos that will be sure to come. I wouldn't expect anything about it for awhile though, it's new, they're still learning, and they may change their approach early on.
