Is cloudflare at a scale where it would be possible for them to provide cheap enough prices on video hosting and bandwidth to enable someone to build a profitable YouTube alternative on top of that? Assuming that a youtube competitor can get to similar scale and make similar revenue.
The competitive advantage of YouTube isn't really in video storage or bandwidth, but rather in its creators community and ad revenue sharing/monetization. Also copyright, regulatory compliance, content moderation are non-trivial.
These are the causes (among many others) that sunk Microsoft's Mixer and potentially Facebook Watch...
No, it needed network and storage first, losing billions for years in order to supply the creators with a service. The non-trivial factors could be trivialized by better community moderation features and niche networks.
I'm scared to calculate how much it would cost to run YouTube off of that.
Many years ago I remember that YouTube reported that 24h of video was uploaded every second. This means that your storage cost would increase by $432/s or $37M/d. This means that you are paying 14B/month by the end of the year just for storage.
Of course there are a number of factors that will work in your favour here:
- You can attempt to focus on only hosting "popular" content instead of allowing anyone to upload. However this can make it difficult to draw new creators to the platform.
- You can definitely negotiate a better rate.
However I'm still under the impression that if you want to create a YouTube competitor you are probably better of starting with lower level components so that you are in a position to reduce costs for old and low traffic videos. My impression of Cloudflare Stream is that it is aimed for people sharing a relatively small amount of content (probably just their own).
