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 and engineer time).
Earning $0.004 for something that costs you $0.025 is never going to work out...
What costs is having a CDN, a bunch of very fast servers that exist in every point-of-presence, given the load they endure CDN cache servers fail quickly when compared to others. -- along with the upkeep of their networking equipment, which is cheap but not free.
But Google itself has invested wisely in how it connects to the internet, they are dark fibre all the way with many hundreds of gigabits between sites and pops. It's a huge upfront investment (the kind SV startups seem to hate) but the long tail makes bandwidth essentially free.
The only cost they have is hardware and peering, and given their size I can't convince myself if they are or are not being shafted financially by big ISPs for peering - even if they are though, it's marginal compared to what GCP/AWS/etc; charge us, even Colo datacenters will charge significantly more than what it costs Google.
Throttle the connection so its slow enough users get 480p video at peak viewing times. Ask google for $$$$ to stop doing that.
I should also note that Google will send data from their DCs over dark fibre to their PoPs near you, so they only transit onto the internet locally.
For example, transfer out from S3 gets down to $0.05 at just 150TB, including the AWS markup.
(Note that CloudFront data out is not directly comparable to S3 data out!)
No, there are no startups in video for the same reason there were no startups in office apps or operating systems in the 2000s, a subsidized 500lb gorilla in the space.
The problem with a video startup is that you have to charge for your content. And some jerk will download your video, post it to YouTube, and distribute it for free.
If YouTube were forced to stand on its own instead of being subsidized by the Google advertising maw, we'd see innovation in the space.
Until YouTube gets broken out from Google by anti-trust action, the video startup space will continue to remain dead.
Also youtube's bitrate usually far below that amount.
> It's why twitter doesn't do HD video.
Twitter does HD video. I don't know whether it is generally available or not, but for example, Tucker Carlson's videos are 1080p.
My question is specifically about YouTube.
