Google Drive reneged on unlimited storage for Education accounts once they realized that universities also contain researchers who need to store huge amounts of data.
Not only did they cut unlimited, they went to insultingly low limits with not much warning after all their nice promises. Moderately large universities ended up with less space per student than the 15GB they give out to anyone for free. It was a pretty bad rug pull.
Massive fraud from abroad didn't help there either. A favorite backup spot for terabytes of pirated media, complete with guides on which schools had good @edu addresses for it.
Hadn't even considered your obvious point, a good one!
YouTube is constantly reencoding videos to save space at the expense of older content looking like mud, so arguably even they're having their struggles.
YT would have to start declining in growth pretty substantially for that to be the case. All the 360p video from 2010-2015 probably doesn't take up even 1% of the storage new videos added in 2025.
True, it's more likely to be aimed at stemming the tide of 4k video that nobody watches - but luckily they're worth more than Disney right now so we don't have to confront that ... yet.
Google does not have unlimited. I had to pay to increase my storage.
Google Drive reneged on unlimited storage for Education accounts once they realized that universities also contain researchers who need to store huge amounts of data.
Not only did they cut unlimited, they went to insultingly low limits with not much warning after all their nice promises. Moderately large universities ended up with less space per student than the 15GB they give out to anyone for free. It was a pretty bad rug pull.
Massive fraud from abroad didn't help there either. A favorite backup spot for terabytes of pirated media, complete with guides on which schools had good @edu addresses for it.
Hadn't even considered your obvious point, a good one!
Google forced everyone off their deprecated G Suite for Business plan (which had unlimited storage) and onto a Workspace plan.
I had to give up and delete plenty of data because of this. That data was important to me, but not important enough to pay their ransom.
YouTube is constantly reencoding videos to save space at the expense of older content looking like mud, so arguably even they're having their struggles.
We all know the "nobody has watched this video in ten years, login at least once or it'll be yeeted" email is coming, someday.
YT would have to start declining in growth pretty substantially for that to be the case. All the 360p video from 2010-2015 probably doesn't take up even 1% of the storage new videos added in 2025.
True, it's more likely to be aimed at stemming the tide of 4k video that nobody watches - but luckily they're worth more than Disney right now so we don't have to confront that ... yet.
YouTube shorts are incredibly highly compressed.