It's unlikely a single devops person or team can scale cheaply. The big CDNs have HUGE economies of scale (read: peering agreements) that make them much, much c

It's unlikely a single devops person or team can scale cheaply. The big CDNs have HUGE economies of scale (read: peering agreements) that make them much, much cheaper than trying to run your own edge network. Hell, even if put your video on an established peer to peer network (similar to bittorrent streaming), the support nightmares would probably cost more than just putting it on an already established CDN. There is really no reason to self-host videos these days. They are write-once (or very rarely), invalidated very rarely, and can be trivially cached everywhere, sort of a best-case scenario for big CDNs. Even if you didn't have to touch a single line of code, trying to reestablish just the business deals yourself across many countries and data interconnects would be ridiculously expensive.