The vast majority of what YouTube does on a technical level is ingesting a ton of uploaded user video, encoding it in dozens of combinations of resolution, framerate, quality, and codec, then seamlessly choosing which version to serve to requesting clients to balance bandwidth, perceived quality, power efficiency in the data center, power efficiency on client devices, and hardware support for the client. There’s a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes, and there’s a reason why the user experience is much more seamless on YouTube on a shitty data connection than, say, Plex on a good data connection.

No, it doesn’t need to be realtime, but people with metered or throttled bandwidth might benefit from downloading just in time video at optimized settings.

Scientology with Chinese characteristics

Yes, a big chunk of the flight demand probably comes from the fact that each is a hub for a major airline (American Airlines has its big hub in DFW, and United has one of its major hubs in IAH).

Still there are a lot of flights between the two cities for passengers who are starting and stopping their journeys there.

It’s not surprising that the first city pair would be a commonly traveled route with cheap flat land in between. Once that’s demonstrated to work, they can start trying it for cities where the need to purchase rights for the route will be more expensive, and on terrain where long straight segments are more challenging to construct.

I wonder how much traffic it will get.

This source says average, about 24,000 people drive between the two cities any given day, and there are about 30 commercial flights per day between the cities. That sounds like a decent amount of potential demand.

This article is about the dropping analyst predictions, leading up to the actual announcement from Tesla.

The official announcement a few hours after the article was 386,810, significantly lower than even the low expectations.