You can easily get more bandwidth though, it's not that it is somehow forbidden. You just don't want to pay for it. That is what youtube gives you: 'unlimited'

You can easily get more bandwidth though, it's not that it is somehow forbidden. You just don't want to pay for it. That is what youtube gives you: 'unlimited' video hosting bandwidth (and improved discoverability) in return for the opportunity to play their ads before your video. The bandwidth costs also don't magically disappear with IPFS, it is just a convenient way to make other people pay for it. In order of increasing independence you could choose to: - Host it on youtube, with the benefits and disadvantages you already mentioned. - Host it on a public S3 bucket and link to it from a HTML5 video player on your web page. You pay for only the storage and bandwidth used. - Keep the video on your own server, but pay a CDN to cache it for you. Actual bandwidth use of you server is now very low again. - Host it on a (big) server in a colocation center. You would typically buy bandwidth in advance though, so you want to be able to roughly predict how much you need. - Contract with a fiber laying company to lay a dedicated fiber line from the nearest backbone to your home. (Alternatively, a large microwave connection) Buy several 100Gbit NICS to go with it and negotiate peering agreements with the major networks. Most people don't want the hassle and cost of the latter options, but they are very possible and very legal. In your example with the programming video, if a ton of people want to see it then somewhere along the chain a lot of bandwidth is going to be used and it is _not_ free. All you do is shift who pays for it.