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Considering how cheap bandwidth is, and how good compression is, are we yet approaching point where it makes sense for content creators to host their own videos

• kevingadd 4y ago
  One of the main reasons creators put content on YouTube is the discovery algorithm. It's much easier to grow an audience for videos on YT compared to hosting it yourself.
• yamtaddle 4y ago
  1) People won't find the content if it's not on Youtube. 2) You will struggle (even more) to monetize the views you do get, if you're not on YouTube. 3) Bandwidth is sorta cheap when you're getting a little bit of it bundled with other things that have high margins (say, cloud VM hosting) but video hosting can exceed what you can get with that kind of "free" bandwidth pretty quickly. It begins to really add up, after that.
• jeroenhd 4y ago
  I think bandwidth hasn't been cheap since up till very recently. Cloudflare's R2 seems like a game changer here, before that you'd be paying a hefty fee to host your videos if you have a decent size following. There's also the network effect: nobody will find your personal site without some kind of cross-site interaction. ActivityPub and friends try to change that, but I haven't seen it take off yet because nobody seriously considers switching to such a model. I'm watching what Floatplane is doing for the video hosting landscape; they seem to run a pretty bare bones operation (though they often run into limitations in practice, i.e. routing problems with some networks, transcoding equipment, dynamic quality, etc)