Technological progress is accompanied by many optimizations, which sometimes look like magic, but are not. One of them was told to us by Tom Peterson from Intel, who told us about the importance of data compression in the global network as part of the latest Gamers Nexus video.
For example, the total bandwidth of the entire Internet on the planet at the moment is about 1.2 Pbps, and YouTube alone, with its current uncompressed viewing time, would consume 130 times more bandwidth. And that’s when calculated with 1080p video at 60 frames per second.
If you want to know how much “weight” one-minute videos have in different resolutions without compression, then here is a small table with these terrible numbers.
If we would take into account a median download speed of 81.95 Mbps (for home Internet), then we would be able to watch uncompressed video without downloads only at 360p resolution. For 8-bit video in 1080p resolution at 30 frames per second, the user would need a channel with a download speed higher than 1.5 Gbps, and for 4K60 with HDR – 16 Gbps (2 gigabytes per second).
That being said, thanks to compression on YouTube, 1080p videos now require only 5 Mbps, while 4K recommends a ridiculous 20 Mbps.
