Rutube showed the price of the update – Kommersant
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Video hosting Rutube, owned by Gazprom Media Holding (GPMKH), expects to catch up with YouTube in key technical indicators and, according to Kommersant, intends to spend about 30 billion rubles on this. The infrastructure upgrade program also includes expanding the network of geographically distributed servers. Experts note that we are talking about either a multi-year funding plan, or a complete upgrade of the service. The implementation of the plan, however, may be hampered by the recent layoffs of key members of the Rutube team.
Rutube expects to invest in a large-scale infrastructure upgrade, two sources familiar with the company’s plans told Kommersant. According to them, video hosting estimates the cost of this in the region of 30 billion rubles. One of the sources said that funding within GPMC has already been allocated: “Initially, Rutube asked for 50-55 billion rubles.”
According to the source, Rutube expects to increase server capacity in such a way that the maximum number of concurrent users of the service is comparable to the level of YouTube. The infrastructure program, according to him, also includes the expansion of the content delivery network (CDN). Rutube did not respond to Kommersant’s request.
CDN allows you to distribute the content of the site across servers geographically located in different locations. In April, Rutube CTO Rostislav Chernakov told ComNews that in addition to the 15 CDN servers already hosted in Russia and Abkhazia, by the end of the year it is planned to add servers in seven more cities of Russia, as well as in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia and Uzbekistan. The intentions of MTS and VK to expand their CDNs in 2023 were reported by RBC and Forbes, respectively.
According to Maxim Koposov, director of the Promobit company (manufacturer of Bitblaze servers and storage systems), some Gazprom structures applied to the company for the purchase of servers, but the declared purchase volume was less. According to him, the average price of one server is about 2-3 million rubles. “Thus, one can understand that Rutube needs about 15,000 servers. Such a volume is usually acquired by large companies like Sberbank, Yandex or VK,” he says. According to Mr. Koposov, purchases may concern both domestic equipment and foreign equipment supplied through parallel imports.
The amount of 30 billion rubles. just expanding the CDN “seems redundant, unless this plan is for five years,” says Pavel Kulakov, CEO of cloud provider Oxygen. He, however, notes that the announced investments “are quite enough to send part of the funds to the CDN, and part to improve the interface, functionality, reliability and convenience of the platform as a whole.”
From the outside, it is difficult to assess the capacity of different CDN networks and the costs of their expansion, since “each company uses different technologies and approaches to building networks,” said Yaroslav Gorodetsky, CEO of CDNvideo. He roughly estimated that for 30 billion rubles. at current market prices, it is possible to build a CDN with a bandwidth of several tens of Tbps: “YouTube traffic in Russia, according to large telecom operators, is about 11–13 Tbps.”
Creating your own CDN network, without involving third-party providers of such services, allows you to provide greater control over the technical component, says iKS-Consulting Lead Consultant Stanislav Mirin: “On the other hand, this requires significant capital investments, in particular, in the purchase of servers, which is now difficult”. At the same time, he notes that to host servers – CDN nodes “do not require many racks, especially if we are talking about a small region.”
It is worth noting that in February, the then CEO of Rutube, Alexander Moiseev, left his post and began to lead the racing simulator project at ANO SMP Racing, Boris Rotenberg (see Kommersant dated April 4). GPMH did not announce the appointment of a new CEO of the video service. Subsequently, other key members of the team also left, and after their dismissal, a number of Rutube projects were put on hold for the duration of the audit, one of Kommersant’s sources says: “I doubt that they will have time to fulfill the budget and roadmap for platform development for this year” .
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