There’s many services out there like that that will charge you for basically the hardware and bandwidth (i.e. a VPS) but will give you an easy interface to host applications - even federated ones. The problem really is how do you compete with free? It’s “free” to watch and free to upload on YouTube. And all your favourite creators are probably already there because of the network effect YouTube has built over the years. And it’s a great place to discover new ones, too, even ones that have been around longer than you’ve been alive (for some folks, anyway).
From a technical perspective, though, this is pretty feasible. With huge upfront costs. If you rent hardware from existing providers like AWS/DigitalOcean/etc. you’re gonna pay out the ass for it. It doesn’t seem expensive to people who just need a little hardware but we’re talking about video here. You have to store multiple versions of a single video - that’s a ton of hard drive space. You have to encode what is uploaded by the users into a workable format - that’s a ton of compute. So if you were gonna provide it to hobbyists at a reasonable price you’d want to open your own data center (yes people still do that) which will give you some, relatively speaking, very very cheap storage, compute, bandwidth. The only issue is it costs a ton upfront and you need someone to maintain it if you don’t know how.
There’s many services out there like that that will charge you for basically the hardware and bandwidth (i.e. a VPS) but will give you an easy interface to host applications - even federated ones. The problem really is how do you compete with free? It’s “free” to watch and free to upload on YouTube. And all your favourite creators are probably already there because of the network effect YouTube has built over the years. And it’s a great place to discover new ones, too, even ones that have been around longer than you’ve been alive (for some folks, anyway).
From a technical perspective, though, this is pretty feasible. With huge upfront costs. If you rent hardware from existing providers like AWS/DigitalOcean/etc. you’re gonna pay out the ass for it. It doesn’t seem expensive to people who just need a little hardware but we’re talking about video here. You have to store multiple versions of a single video - that’s a ton of hard drive space. You have to encode what is uploaded by the users into a workable format - that’s a ton of compute. So if you were gonna provide it to hobbyists at a reasonable price you’d want to open your own data center (yes people still do that) which will give you some, relatively speaking, very very cheap storage, compute, bandwidth. The only issue is it costs a ton upfront and you need someone to maintain it if you don’t know how.