Video Hosting Costs

Streaming video is freakin' expensive. You have to pay upfront to transcode the video into many formats and bitrates, or pay more per stream to do it in real-time. Also pay for storage for all the video formats, and video takes a ton of bandwidth when you're paying by the gigabyte. (You could maybe run a video site with the quality and device-compatibility of a early-90's video site for free.)

Delivering the video isn't where I think most of the costs are. They've a few times its the free transcode service they offer to just about any one who streams on the platform is where much of their costs are.

Bandwidth costs all video sites a lot.Thats why cloudflare won't host sites with lots of video. It's why twitter doesn't do HD video. Thats why there are no startups trying to make video hosting sites.If you hosted a youtube clone on AWS with their cloudfront CDN, you'd be paying $0.085 per GB out to the internet. A youtube ad view earns perhaps $0.004. HD video is ~6GB/hour, so a 3 minute video costs $0.0255 to host (before compute and storage costs, profit a

You're really overestimating the cost of video storage and streaming compared to the kind of revenue they're able to get.

Self-hosting video at scale is still pretty expensive although using CDN can reduce it.

content, and pure scale, video hosting is enormously expensive to do at scale, youtube is able to do so because it is backed by google.

In 2025 it's actually not that expensive. CDNs aggressively drive down the cost of streaming video.A 1080p music video costs about one tenth of one cent to serve to one person at retail CDN rates.You could easily host this yourself and decide what the terms are to view it. E.g. ads, or paywall or free because you benefit from the exposure.Once upon a time AdSense/YouTube saved you from getting an unmanageable $5,000 bill from your ISP because your content went viral but nowada

Cost of streaming videos is not storage, it's dominated by bandwidth. Bandwidth is expensive when you can't cache videos the way Netflix does.

Hosting video with lots of views probably isn't cheap.

For me, it's a little bit that, but probably just as much the bandwidth costs. I used to host some video content, but even if one video got 1/10th the views it gets on YouTube, it would be many TB of bandwidth, and that gets quite expensive.The solution is to upload in like 360p low quality, but then any screen recordings are a muddy mess and there's no point.