While you can put an mp4 file on a webserver and call it a day, it'll most likely be a pretty bad experience for the users.
Without defining the experience you can call it better or worse than any random thing!
But if the video stops every 0.1 seconds to buffer for two hours, is that better than stopping very 25 minutes for a 30 second ad?
If the video must be 24 x 32 pixels for the bandwidth to be low enough for your server restrictions, is that worse than the above scenario but a 4k 60fps video?
Where do you draw the line for experience?
That's vague. I think most people would disagree, and the commenter is right that people put up with ads for a certain degree of quality. We used to have 4 minute ad breaks on TV. The only reason people moved to streaming is because the quality was the same.
I can't imagine ads are doing much more damage to our mental health than the content we consume in the first place. Likely less.
* it serves it with correct codecs, whatever the original input
* from local servers that are close to the user, so it's faster
* it doesn't kill your bills when the video becomes moderately popular
* discussions built-in
* virality built-in
* it won't go down when you forget to pay your server
* you don't need to deal with hosting software updates
You can solve some of that with CDNs, some of them even do some kind of video players that do all the ffmpeg stuff for you, but then you have a third party in the mix again.
Even a paid service, Vimeo, made news a few years ago because they would bill video uploaders for "moderately popular" videos: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30686704
A well formatted blog takes maybe 1MB at most per request (a really well made blog can lower that quicker). 20 minutes of 1080p video is ~500mb according to most YouTube downloading tools. Hetzner offers you 20TB of free internet traffic per month for every VPS you buy.
That one blog can be send up to 20000000 (that's 20 million!) times to people every month before you'd have to start looking for CDNs or other fancy solutions. By contrast, that 20 minute video runs out of bandwidth after 40000 (40 thousand) times before you hit the same scenario. (These are hypotheticals, of course you'd incur more due to traffic overhead and the realistic answer that you'll have more than one page/file on your site.)
It's essentially a scale problem; bandwidth is really expensive if you don't outright own (and have the need to use) a data center or colocate. (And even then it's still expensive, it just goes from completely unreasonable to "maybe a sustainable business".) Alternatively, CDN solutions also get very expensive very quickly at the amount of traffic that digital video tends to consume (which wouldn't be selfhosting it anymore, but is worth a mention).
And that's without going into the discovery issues or the fact that browsers accept much fewer codecs than you'd expect for video playback (which can further bloat up storage size as you might have to use less efficient solutions.)
Let's say a creator decided to move to some non-YouTube platform that pays exactly the same as YouTube, via ads and premium subscriptions, whatever that platform is, it will have nowhere near the size of the audience that YouTube has, meaning the creator will be losing out on revenue.
This discourages creators from moving away from YouTube, meaning viewers will stay on YouTube
If you make videos for money you are highly interested in following googles rules, no matter how insane they get.
Maybe don’t make a career out of videos? If everyone just stopped doing that, Google would have a lot less muscle when telling people what they could do in their videos.
Life pro tip: never do things solely for money.
People seem to get mad when I say that but they also seem to misunderstand what I mean when I say “solely for money”. If you have a job that pays the bills, don’t make YouTube videos solely because you will have more money. Doing so will put you in Googles mercy, and you will be scared to death to do anything that removes that income. Instead, make videos to help your career, or simply for fun, and don’t monetize them. Google can’t threaten your income if you don’t get income from them.
Mostly it comes from patreon or equivalent, sponsorship deals and merch sales.
Youtube exists only because discoverability, and ads profit goes mostly to YT itself.
People make money on youtube through ads, you can't do that (as effectively) on your own server. This also ties with the analytics.
Some organisations like the ready-made administration solution. Uploading files through ftp isn't for everyone. Youtube (and hosting platforms) has a nice ui to manage all the content, handles the user authentication etc.
Bandwith.
Backups.
I aggree that for people who don't need all these, and are tech savvy, uploading an mp4 to a server is the way to go.
I get why people use YouTube though. But it is precarious too. You own jack shit.
It has _a_ UI.
> uploading an mp4 to a server is the way to go.
Hotlinking.
Connection limit tuning.
DDoS.
People don't want the hassle.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=v...
Video hosting should not be tied to profit motives. If that's your thing, if your job is making videos to sell things or display ads, then yes, you're gonna need Alphabet's Google's Youtube or some similar megacorp to handle money transfers and for network effect.
If you're like 99% of the rest of us on Earth then a static .mp4 file with -movflags +faststart is great and satisfies all needs.
The solution is to upload in like 360p low quality, but then any screen recordings are a muddy mess and there's no point.
its super convenient, even non-techies will get it done within 15min, also you have lot of supportive functions / tools in der admin interface.
Also because ISPs are terrible companies that will sabotage your attempt to stream video for no reason other than spite.
In theory you can just point a browser at a video and it'll play. The problem is, for a significant chunk of the world, that video will only play halfway through, or play barely if at all, or it'll take an hour to load even though you have an excellent connection.
Then, there's the discoverability problem. If you want to create a channel, you want people to know your channel exists. So do millions of others. Youtube and similar platforms use tag/content correlation to suggest videos (and then some AI bullshit to do the same but worse) to naturally grow your audience over time.
The web archive copy of his LibreELEC video is 860MiB in size. His recent RPi video got 156k views over 6 days. Transferring the 1073 TBit of video over those 6 days in the most optimal scenario would require a constant stream of 2070mbps. At the VPS provider I find most reliable, that'll cost him €124 just for the network traffic for the first six days. That's not taking into account the burst of tens of thousands of viewers just after releasing a video, or the fact that Jeff has tons of other videos on his channel.
Of course there are optimizations. You could transcode the video to even lower bitrates to save bandwidth, you could set up different quality profiles and write/buy a complex video player library to handle those automatically. Peertube tries to solve this problem by leveraging P2P video, but not everyone is a fan of exposing their IP address to every other viewer (bot, human, data collection tool) when they play a video. And then you need to kick out all the scrapers and download bots wasting your bandwidth for their personal gain.
Plus, you can't monetize the videos. Great for people consuming content already paid for, like government instruction videos or corporate productions, but terrible for people who use Youtube to fund the video creation process itself.
Even Jeff Geerling, someone with a sizeable audience of relatively wealthy audience (thanks, tech industry!), says he cannot maintain his channel through Patreon alone:
> I was never able to sustain my open source work based on patronage, and content production is the same—just more expensive to maintain to any standard (each video takes between 10-300 hours to produce, and I have a family to feed, and US health insurance companies to fund).
Youtube happened for a good reason and it can't happen again without wasting billions on making the servers, software, bandwidth, and content in general free for years before it can reach critical mass. Even for hobbyists, offsetting the network egress fees alone would be a challenge without monetization.
Linus Tech Tips is trying to spread their eggs across more baskets by setting up Floatplane, and there's a reason Floatplane is far from free. Sticking a webm file on a web server somewhere is a solution for videos that get a couple hundred views, but it quickly becomes unsustainable.