Video is the sort of thing that benefits significantly from economies of scale. Encoding and bandwidth costs are your two biggest factors. Encoding has to be done once -- well, once per rendition you ship, more on that in a second -- but bandwidth costs are, modulo volume discounts,
very linear, and thus a direct per-viewer-minute line item. Those bandwidth costs typically depend on your desired quality of video (bitrate) and capacity of service. CDNs and traditional cloud services tend to have expensive outbound bandwidth. VPSes etc. don't, but it's not fast enough to serve many users, and what happens when you hit transfer limits is Not Great.
It is pretty rare in 2021 to serve video just as "video files". HLS and DASH allow for adaptive quality streaming for bandwidth- or performance-constrained devices -- which can also help keep costs down, if you're shipping lower bitrate 480p renditions to some clients rather than full-boat 1080p -- and make resumption of partially played media easier. (Because you can append segments to an HLS or DASH manifest, you can also use this technology more easily for live-streamed content.)
This stuff is complicated. You can build out the pipelines to do this stuff yourself with either cloud services or a lot of duct tape -- I've done it before -- but it's A Lot Of Work to get right and economies of scale are a real thing. There exist services like Mux Video (YC W16, https://mux.com -- this is a shameless plug; I work on the devex team) package this and present straightforwardly consumable APIs for folks who just want to ship decent video at a reasonable price.
It is pretty rare in 2021 to serve video just as "video files". HLS and DASH allow for adaptive quality streaming for bandwidth- or performance-constrained devices -- which can also help keep costs down, if you're shipping lower bitrate 480p renditions to some clients rather than full-boat 1080p -- and make resumption of partially played media easier. (Because you can append segments to an HLS or DASH manifest, you can also use this technology more easily for live-streamed content.)
This stuff is complicated. You can build out the pipelines to do this stuff yourself with either cloud services or a lot of duct tape -- I've done it before -- but it's A Lot Of Work to get right and economies of scale are a real thing. There exist services like Mux Video (YC W16, https://mux.com -- this is a shameless plug; I work on the devex team) package this and present straightforwardly consumable APIs for folks who just want to ship decent video at a reasonable price.