Every other week these figures appear and every time on HN they are debunked.
The Credit Suisse analyst's report has little idea about how delivering large amounts of data on the net works. See my previous comments on this story for more information.
Based on Credit Suisse's bandwidth cost estimate, it seems like YouTube would have to be pushing more than 10PB per day (petabytes). That's assuming a $0.10/GB bandwidth cost. Now, I'm sure that Google is getting a lower bandwidth cost than I can get on a dedicated server as just me with my credit card.
So, I think it's safe to assume from those numbers that Google's pushing a few dozen petabytes from YouTube every day. That's a lot of data.
They're probably already doing settlement-free peering with various ISPs due to their sheer volume of data transfer, which would mean that they aren't paying for all of the bandwidth they're using. Otherwise, the ISPs they're peering with would have to pay someone else for the bandwidth to use YouTube.
Google probably has SOME connectivity they pay for, but by now they are effectively their own Tier 1 network, considering how much Internet traffic flows to their servers. They have a 2-byte ASN, which basically means they're a major backbone network. ISPs drool at the chance to peer with Google and get tariff-free YouTube/Google traffic, which probably constitutes a significant chunk of their overall volume.
Considering that Google has all of these little mini-datacenters spread throughout major colo facilities, a ton of the edge-to-edge traffic probably flows over in-building GigE or 10GigE. It probably costs them a penny per TB delivered to a peered ISP rather than $.05/GB us peons pay at the colo. The ~8mbit multi-T1 connection at my office amounts to about 38 cents per gigabyte in or out if we use it at 100% capacity 24/7/365. That's still more expensive than the 250GB capped Comcast user, who's effectively paying about 20 cents per gigabyte.
For me, youtube has largely replaced pirating music as a means for discovering bands (this is why it angers me so much when videos get muted). The cost for me to check out a band I might be interested in is ~$0.00.
If they started charging me for this, I would either want something that I got to keep, or I would start pirating again.
But music videos are promotional, meaning the label would pay YouTube/Google for the cost of distribution. You don't get CD quality on YouTube (and I actively buy CDs because they sound better to me than MP3).
I mean TV shows, lectures and science programs - video with educational value.
The Credit Suisse analyst's report has little idea about how delivering large amounts of data on the net works. See my previous comments on this story for more information.