Bandwidth isn't really the problem. Vimeo exists, and they serve considerably higher bitrates than YouTube. The problem is that YouTube is entrenched, and has n

Bandwidth isn't really the problem. Vimeo exists, and they serve considerably higher bitrates than YouTube. The problem is that YouTube is entrenched, and has network effects on its side. A fresh new competitor to YouTube would face a combination of a lack of advertisers, and a lack of content seeking ad-funding. On the other hand, when it comes to pay-to-watch content, there's space in the market for new competitors to arise, as the network effects are less significant there. https://rakuten.tv/ https://rakuten.tv/ and https://chili.com/ https://chili.com/ for instance, are far smaller than Amazon and Google. I guess bandwidth costs are, in a sense, the problem. If if were easy to run a very-large-scale video-hosting site, that would help, sure. Ads wouldn't have to be worth much to make the business work. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-sided_market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-sided_market