One nasty implication is that adaptive bandwidth streaming as YouTube and Vimeo provide is tricky to get right. It’s definitely beyond “any other static file.”

One nasty implication is that adaptive bandwidth streaming as YouTube and Vimeo provide is tricky to get right. It’s definitely beyond “any other static file.” It’s a nice feature to allow clients to stream the max bitrate they can handle without buffering. Without this, you sacrifice either quality of those with good connections, or the complete experience of those with poor ones. I ended up struggling with ffmpeg and JPlayer which is never a good day. Additionally, you need to make sure you use the right codec, something supported on FF, Chrome, and Linux/Mac/Windows/Android/iOS. Due to codec power struggles, this is not self evident. Hosting video is harder than it seems :(