There are plenty of familiar examples of technological marvels. Cramming billions of transistors into a computer chip is pretty amazing, for instance. But did you know just how cool streaming video is?

Intel’s Tom Petersen recently gave Gamers Nexus a deep dive into the nuts and bolts of video compression and the details are genuinely fascinating even if you already had a rough idea of how it all works. Just for starters, without the availability of video compression technology, YouTube alone would eat up well over 100 times the entire world’s total internet bandwidth thanks to its one billion hours of served video per day.

To put some numbers on that, Petersen says the world’s current internet bandwidth comes in at 1.2Pbits per second. If you assume streaming at 1080p SDR, YouTube would need 155Pbits per second to stream its content in uncompressed video.

You can multiply that figure by about 10 for full HDR 4K video. So, if YouTube streamed everything in uncompre…