• Yeah, I don’t know how YouTube works exactly, but the margins they’ve historically earned tell me it’s not simple or low-resource in any way. How big a scale do you need before you could make it work? It’s not something to run on a home server, but I assume you don’t have to be YouTube, if you could earn a bit more per user.

      • Massive up front investment. Millions of dollars of hardware, distributed to be close to end users to minimize latency, all with their own redundant internet connections.

        Petabyte level storage- that’s thousands of terabytes. Video storage takes up a lot of space, and storage drives fail. For every piece of equipment you have to buy a second one to run in parallel, that way if one fails the other can keep the system running. Oh, and you need a third so you can replace the one that failed.

        Hosting in general is a very high investment prospect. You can do it Inexpensively using something like plex, but that isn’t very scalable.