YouTube’s biggest feature is discovery. “The algorithm.”
Sure, you might be able to self host videos, for relatively little money. But who is going to watch them? Alternatives like Floatplane, CuriosityStream, Nebula, etc all are great platforms and far more creator-friendly (mostly because they were built and owned by creators) but they all flounder when it comes to the discovery and hooking aspect because the amount of content on them is minuscule, and at the end of the day the viewer just goes back to YT.
You might have cheap S3 storage to tons tons of MP4 video, but to transcode it, add CDN and everything added up.
Cloudflare pricing example is a good guide here. 6 dollar for storage, but egress fee is 72.
https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/products/cloudflare-stream/
>Streaming a library of 500 GB of HD videos over the course of one month with approximately 72,000 minutes of viewing time to a global market.
And below is:
>Streaming costs at a rate of $1 per 1,000 minutes delivered.
So if you have tiktok style short videos of ~1 min, you only need a $1 CPM to break even.
Anything with monetization will have to be within the guidelines of the provider or the advertisers will make the platform provider cancel the content regardless of platform.
Insanely.
If you take MrBeast's last video which is 200MB when downloaded in 1080p and has been viewed 40M times, we have 0.2GB * 40,000,000 = 20M GB of data transferred just for this one video.
If you look at the price of AWS's CloudFront (a CDN) transfer out to the internet, it would cost $200,000 just to serve that video to the internet.
This is just for pure data transfer. It's not viable even a second.
On a regular scale fine to host videos if you are with a regular hoster and not pay AWS/GCP network prices. The problem is that you won't get traffic, you won't be discovered, you'd have to do a lot of things that you'll get for free on dedicated video platforms (transcoding, keeping a lot of different formats available to work with all devices,...)
I'm sorry but this is just completely wrong.
The price scales linearly, not exponentially, so it doesn't matter if you have 100,000 views or 40M, you will pay more in serving the video than anything you would earn on it.
> On a regular scale fine to host videos if you are with a regular hoster and not pay AWS/GCP network prices.
This is also wrong. If you are lucky your hosting provider will allow 1TB of transfer per month as fair use.
That gets you a grand total of 5,000 views on that 200MB video we talked about. A 17 minutes, heavily compressed video.
If your scope is bigger than sharing a video once in a while with your not-so-extended family, it will NOT be accommodated by a standard provider.
Where did you get that from? That's very outdated information. Popular hosters in that kind of space:
Hetzner (For a 90 Euro / month server): "In this special case, we will charge the usage over 20TB with € 1.19/TB"
OVH: Even on a 20 Euro / month server you can push ~10TB / month easily without problems. Ask all the people hosting their seedboxes there.
Might buffer 3 minutes of video in that time, but hardly any of those views are the full video.