You did say practically, but I’m saying that practically is still a cost. You are still paying money to serve your videos.
People post on YouTube because they don’t have to pay the server costs for videos. If you want to get the video makers to pay the server costs, feel free. However, given their thin margins, they probably won’t.
Also, it sounds like your CDN is betting your videos won’t routinely go viral and get billions of views. If that happened, I would expect your monthly bill to go up.
My CDN’s policies are pretty well set via contract. There is no provision for using too much bandwidth and I pay yearly at any rate.
I bring this up not so the average joe can host their own videos, but to point out that yes, someone can create a youtube clone. The hosting of multimedia content isn’t what stops that. A site like youtube has to attract 2 market verticals: talent and users, which is incredibly difficult without gobs of money to throw at it.
But you are also missing item 3, monetization. Alphabet turns practically free into something they can make money off of with advertising. People who are popular enough on YouTube get paid for what they make. It may not be a lot, but it is more than having to pay to get your video hosted.
And those content creators that strike out on their own platforms typically put their content behind a paywall to fund the cost to develop and distribute their work.
The cost for the system may be practically free, but it isn’t actually free.
You did say practically, but I’m saying that practically is still a cost. You are still paying money to serve your videos.
People post on YouTube because they don’t have to pay the server costs for videos. If you want to get the video makers to pay the server costs, feel free. However, given their thin margins, they probably won’t.
Also, it sounds like your CDN is betting your videos won’t routinely go viral and get billions of views. If that happened, I would expect your monthly bill to go up.
My CDN’s policies are pretty well set via contract. There is no provision for using too much bandwidth and I pay yearly at any rate.
I bring this up not so the average joe can host their own videos, but to point out that yes, someone can create a youtube clone. The hosting of multimedia content isn’t what stops that. A site like youtube has to attract 2 market verticals: talent and users, which is incredibly difficult without gobs of money to throw at it.
But you are also missing item 3, monetization. Alphabet turns practically free into something they can make money off of with advertising. People who are popular enough on YouTube get paid for what they make. It may not be a lot, but it is more than having to pay to get your video hosted.
And those content creators that strike out on their own platforms typically put their content behind a paywall to fund the cost to develop and distribute their work.
The cost for the system may be practically free, but it isn’t actually free.