That's quite a claim made without any pointer to evidence. Do you have any evidence to back up this claim?

IA has been around for many years and not bumped into this problem. Nor are they making choices that even hint at this problem. In fact, they have long made choices (such as default derivatives generation) which suggest they have plenty of storage space and bandwidth.

Also, this isn't an evidenceless complaint specific to IA.

RasPi + Cloudflare should be a good solution. Even live streaming is possible with CDN as live streams are just conventions with playlists and metadata. I can't comment on costs at scale, but Twitter claims equal ingress and egress bandwidth for Persicope (ie. first egress hit caches), standard HLS will just have more latency and not more cache misses if I understand correctly. My stream is 1500-2500kbps 720p.