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If you already have an audience you can upload a file directly to the Internet and link to it from your Patreon.

And where would you propose to upload it to? Video hosting is not cheap for heavy video streaming.

Serious question - dedicated servers/VPSes with unmetered bandwidth are still a thing. Get a few of those, point your DNS name at all of them (for redundancy & load balancing) and rsync/FTP your files to all of them.

I can see this being a problem with viral, publicly-available content, but for subscription-only content the traffic patterns should be relatively predictable and capped.

Am I missing something?

Yes, all those cheap servers and VPS with “unlimited” bandwidth have fair use policies and qos metering that will likely be very similar to vimeo’s. They certainly don’t mean TB of high quality video streaming every month when they say unlimited bandwidth

I'm sure fly by night, cheap providers do that, but there are long-term reputable providers such as OVH offering unmetered bandwidth on pretty much all their services. Are those also problematic?

I kickstarted a indie movie once and they just gave me a direct download link. There was no streaming involved.

Supposing the movie was 5GB what do you think it would cost per download?

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