YouTube's scale: 500 hours uploaded per minute. 4B+ hours watched daily. Ingest → transcode → distribute. Google's global infrastructure powers it.

UploadWatchUpload Ingestchunked resumableWatch APITranscode Farm100+ variantsContent IDcopyright detectRanking + RecAds ServiceAnalyticsGCS StorageBigtablemetadataEdge Cacheglobal CDNML Modelsrecs + moderationAd Exchange
YouTube: ingest → transcode → Content ID → GCS → CDN + rec + ads
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Chunked resumable upload

Big video files → chunked upload with resume. Ingest first, transcode async. User sees 'processing...'

Chunked resumable upload

Big video files → chunked upload with resume. Ingest first, transcode async. User sees 'processing...'

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Transcode farm

Every video encoded into 20+ resolutions + codecs (VP9, AV1, H.264). Adaptive bitrate. Global compute footprint.

Content ID

Fingerprint database of copyrighted material. New uploads matched. Owners can block, monetize, or track. 50M+ hours of reference content.

Recs = core loop

Rec model + upload rank drive 70%+ of watch time. Two-tower embeddings. Watch history + engagement signals. Recs updated per session.

Edge caching

Videos cached at Google's edge. Popular content at every PoP. Long tail on regional caches. Google Global Cache extends to ISPs.

Ingest + transcode + Content ID + recs + edge cache. Every layer optimized for exabytes/day of video.