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Here’s a follow-up to my previous post at Current global Youtube bandwidth might be 126 petabytes per month that I posted as a comment here:

Let me do a quick calculation on the actual expense for Google per 1000 views:

Standard Youtube quality is at 320×180 - 350kbit/s Sorenson - 25fps - 22hz mono audio thus consumes about 8 Megabytes of bandwidth for a 3 minute clip. Guessing that the average Youtube view measured (75 Billion views per year according to Credit Suisse) watches a 3 minute clip.

75 Billion times 8 Megabytes = approximately 590625000 Gigabytes of bandwidth consumed by Google for Youtube per year. = Approximately 590 thousand Terrabytes of bandwidth per year.

Let’s assume Google has brought the cost down per Gigabyte towards $0.05, assuming that since Google is the largest single user of bandwidth in the world with Youtube, that they do get discounts on bandwidth pricing by the content delivery networks and since Google owns and builds many of the fiber optic lines and nodes themselves to including builds the server parks as close to all viewers as possible.

590 Thousand Terrabytes per year times $0.05/GB only amounts to a cost for Google of $29.531.250 dollars to host Youtube each year at this point.

I surely think that below $30 Million for hosting Youtube each year, that is pretty manageable.

Surely my estimate of total cost at $0.05 might be low considering you add other Cloud Computing costs to just Bandwidth, such as storage, encoding capacity and processing power to process each request fast.

If you consider Google would pay $0.10 per GB delivered, and that the average Youtube view instead is 6 minutes in length (in my opinion very unlikely, a Youtube view average length probably is closer to 1 minute, since people skip stuff they don’t really like), then Google would still only have an expense per year for Youtube of below $120 Million per year for delivering those 75 Billion views per year.

Now consider a certain % of Youtube views now are in High Quality mode which uses 480×270 - 1mbit/s Sorenson - 25fps - 44hz stereo mp3 audio and even that more and more of the views are in the Youtube HD format 1280×720 - 2mbit/s H264 - full framerate - 44hz stereo 254kbit/s AAC audio, I still think those HQ and HD formats are only a small % of all Youtube views since most people don’t bother clicking to get HQ and HD quality when viewing and that HQ requires 1mbit/s+ download speed and HD required 2mbit/s+ download speed and a fast computer to decode 720p H264 Flash content.

So my guess is that Google definitely keeps Youtube expenses below $100 Million all included so far, and my estimate is that Google could quickly be making MANY Billions of dollars in revenue from Youtube as soon as Google decides to flip the monetization switch. Which basically means to allow all Youtube content providers to activate overlay advertising on all their videos, which will include referals for 1-click sales including digital content sales and shipped products (for example 1-click Amazon buy), including integrated sales of merchandizing and much much more. Youtube hasn’t even integrated very much full length full quality commercially produced contents such as being a Hulu and all-in-one VOD provider.

Anyways, in my points Youtube will quickly become Google’s biggest source of revenues and profits, and I think it probably is the biggest part of Google’s future and I actually think the growth of Youtube view-counts and bandwidth usage is only at the very early stages and that we are soon going to be talking about thousand and millions of times more views and bandwidth usage once all people transfer their 5-hour daily TV watching to be source from Youtube through set-top-boxes and other ways to watch Youtube on the TV and on mobile devices.

If Google had to get a CPM on ALL videos today to cover their bandwidth and service costs, in my estimation that CPM would be: $1.33 CPM. That would be a CPM very easy for Google to exceed even by only monetizing a fraction of all the views. A $15 CPM is very likely achievable by Google with good overlay advertising, thus Google would only have to monetize less than 10% of all the views with overlay advertising to make a profit.

That is based on my estimate that Google covers mosts bandwidth/storage/ cloud computing expenses at below $100 million per year for 75 Billion views.

I see no reason why Google would be paying more than $0.10 per Gigabyte transfered for normal Youtube views. And I think that most of those most popular Youtube views are for short standard quality video files.

The main goal of the OLPC, and thus, of the whole computer industry at this point, is to lower the cost of laptops by lowering the power consumption. The best way to achieve that, is to limit the way applications get full native access to the deep internals of the computer system. Intel’s X86 standard and Microsoft’s Windows OS were designed only for that multi-purpose backwards compatibility where the same unoptimized bloated software would work across thousands of hardware configurations with often full root access to the deepest internals of a computer system. For most of the applications that most people need, you do not need full native code support in third party applications. By limiting full native access for third party applications, you take care in one swoop of all the security problems that one has on Intel and Microsoft based PC and laptops. You basically make spyware, viruses, hacking and all of those problems impossible by design.

That is how Android is made. Android provides a totally sandboxed JAVA-based software layer, which only interacts with the hardware features through totally controllable software-to-hardware APIs. With Android on ARM, you have a complete shift in the way third party applications are run compared to X86 Windows XP/7, MacOSX and even most of those X86 Desktop Linux distributions that have been going around, including Ubuntu and Fedora.

The open source native Android Linux code hacking happens exclusively at the manufacturer stage. Which means, you want to have a manufacturer in control of everything, you want the manufacturer to customize Android for the very specific mass produced hardware in question, providing all the standard and non-standard software-to-hardware APIs for third party software developers to gain access to the all of the devices standard or special hardware features.

What you have backing Android is the worlds absolute best company in Google, comprised of the worlds largest concentration of PHDs and Engineers with the most experience in Web and computer technology. The role of Google with Android is to make sure that the native Android code works in the most optimal fashion with the most optimal hardware configurations that manufacturers are making for it. Google helps manufacturers prepare that Android native code customization for each different System On Chip, for each different variation on the ARM Cortex processor profiles by each of the industry leading ARM processor manufacturers among Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Freescale, Samsung, Nvidia, Marvell and others.

If you want to change the default Android user interface layer and make it look more like the Sugar User Interface layer (which for XO-1 was built on top of an optimized X86 Fedora Linux installation), you definitely can do those changes and customizations. Those would come from the manufacturers, thus in the case of OLPC from the whole OLPC organization, in cooperation with Google or anyone else helping to create a more education-laptop friendly user interface. But Android applications remain the same, and appart from slight porting that can be required, all Android applications are designed to work in full screen mode, and management of multi-tasking, notifications, memory and processing power consumption, all those are managed the same way accros all implementations of the Android OS.

HP has just announced that they are working to support Android in future HP Laptops. Asus has announced to be working on Android laptops. Look forward to Android ruling over all ARM Laptop implementations, at least for these where the lowest cost and the lowest power consumption levels have been achieved. Look forward to $100 Android ARM laptops. Look forward to the empire of Intel and Microsoft crumbling under the inevitable hardware and software revolution that comes with the XO-2 and with the whole industry’s shift to lower cost, lower power consumption using ARM and Android in all laptops.