Bandwidth these days can be less than .25/m at a 100g commit in US/EU, and OVH is pushing dozens of tb/s.
Big ups on keeping independent.
Y'all just have two different budgets. For one person $30 / mo is reasonable for the other it's expensive.
But the core claim, that $5 / mo hosts a lot of non-video content but not much video content, holds.
But yeah okay, not any server variant can do this and the cloud premium is real. You'd need so spend like 5€/month on real hard drives if you want, say, 4TB of video storage on top of your existing website (the vimeo and dailymotion price points mentioned suggest that their catalogue is above 1 but below 2 TB). The 5€/month estimate is based on the currently most-viewed 4TB hard drive model in the tweakers pricewatch (some 100€), a modest average longevity of 5 years, triple redundancy, and that you would otherwise be running on smaller drives anyway for your normal website and images so there's no (significant) additional labor or electricity costs for storage (as in, you just buy a different variant of the same setup, not need to install additional ones)
A $28/mo (Australian) vimeo subscription, or the "Advanced" $91/mo plan include the same 2TB bandwidth/month for viewers of your videos.
If you upload a 100MB video and it gets 20000 views the whole way through, you are now in the "contact sales" category of pricing.
This is why Youtube has a monopoly, because you've been badly tricked into thinking this pricing is fair and that 2TB is in any way shape or form adequate.
It’s a trade off I suppose - you can very well host your own streaming solution, and for the same price you can get a great single node, but if you want good TTFB and nodes with close proximity to many regions you may as well pay for a managed solution as the price for multiple VPS/VM stacks up quickly when you have a low budget
Edit: I think I missed your point about bandwidth pricing lol, but the second still stands
Could be a lot cheaper and less need for global distribution if low latency weren't a requirement. And by low latency I mean the video stream you watch is ~2s behind reality just like Youtube, Twitch, Kick, etc. If your use case is VOD or can tolerate 10s latency streaming, single PoP works fine.
The point is that if I chose Vimeo or AWS/GCP/Azure for this, at their bandwidth pricing my (in my opinion modest) usage would be costing tens of thousands of dollars monthly, which it most certainly does not.
Managed service pricing and the perception of it needs to change, because it feels like a sham once you actually do anything yourself.