Right, that’s probably true. Video encoding hardware and storage is incredibly cheap, but we get talks from netflix engineers where they’re talking about how they’re limited by dram bandwidth on their servers.

Some napkin math:

Youtube has ~7M average concurrent viewers.

https://streamscharts.com/overview?platform=youtube

A 1080p av1 stream is roughly 2-3mbits, maybe 5mbits for 60fps. You could serve all of those users with 14tbps of bandwidth, then.

Stockholm peering pricing for 14tbps (rough ballpark at this scale tbf) over 43x 400gbit ports at a Stockholm Internet eXchange, would cost about 240k EUR/month, with a 25% volume discount.

https://www.netnod.se/ix/netnod-ix-pricing

For comparison, Mastodon’s monthly donations are about 30k EUR/month, and lemmy.world receives about 2k EUR/month.

Super rough calculations, but there’s probably enough of a base in the fediverse for us to take over like 5% of Youtube’s viewer base, funded through donations. Not as cheap as wikipedia, but still doable with a committed open-source community. Beyond that, and a netflix/spotify/nebula subscription model would allow to fund further market share.

It’s notable to see though that Nebula seems to have millions in monthly revenue, but only about 700k subscribers (aka barely 100k concurrent streams). However I believe the majority of their expenses are going towards their creators and towards marketing for future growth.

But yeah, I think network effect is a bigger barrier than cost here.

Storage more likely. Google owns fiber backbones and peers against the tier 1 providers directly. The over all point of ‘no, it’s still prohibitively expensive’ stands unless you’ve got 20B of dark fiber in your pocket.

And our own bandwidth, too. Google isn’t paying my Internet bill. Hope the rest of my content creators switch soon, otherwise I’ll miss them.

Yes, that’s also why bittorrent (which PeerTube runs on, by the way) is a figment of our collective imaginations, impossible to viably implement.