What are the per-viewer costs these days to host video files on a plain web server? Perhaps with a CDN?
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 (bi…
We need something like bit torrent for video, where the peers send chunks biased toward the beginning of the video. This would spread the bandwidth costs to the viewers. Sure, the main site might be constantly streaming 1 or 2 full streams, but that can be fairly low bandwidth.