by planckscnst 3 hours ago
If they were using this compression for storage on the cache layer, it could allow more videos closer to where they serve them, but they decide the. Back to webm or whatever before sending them to the client.
I don't think that's actually what's up, but I don't think it's completely ruled out either.
That doesn't sound worth it, storage is cheap, encoding videos is expensive, caching videos in a more compact form but having to rapidly re-encode them into a different codec every single time they're requested would be ungodly expensive.
Storage gets less cheap for short-form tiktoks where the average rate of consumption is extremely high and the number of niches is extremely large.