Practically and actually are two different things.
Just because serving the video costs a fraction of a cent doesn’t mean you can round that down to zero, especially when you are serving billions of video views a day.
I did say practically free.
IRL Example: I host several videos across my various sites. I pay $99/mo for a CDN. Said CDN caches my videos and does not charge for bandwidth usage. Therefore you can technically argue that I pay $99/mo for X visitors. In actuality , the CDN caches all my content. It also provides DDOS protection, a firewall, and other advanced features. That is what I pay $99/mo for.
My cost to distribute the video is $99 + my hosting bill ($50-$200/mo depending on backend jobs) / number of views. This would be true if the video has 1 view or a billion (most of the ones I host have had “millions” of views)
The video can be 360p or 8k. CDN does not care. Mine are 4k.
You did say practically, but I’m saying that practically is still a cost. You are still paying money to serve your videos.
People post on YouTube because they don’t have to pay the server costs for videos. If you want to get the video makers to pay the server costs, feel free. However, given their thin margins, they probably won’t.
Also, it sounds like your CDN is betting your videos won’t routinely go viral and get billions of views. If that happened, I would expect your monthly bill to go up.
My CDN’s policies are pretty well set via contract. There is no provision for using too much bandwidth and I pay yearly at any rate.
I bring this up not so the average joe can host their own videos, but to point out that yes, someone can create a youtube clone. The hosting of multimedia content isn’t what stops that. A site like youtube has to attract 2 market verticals: talent and users, which is incredibly difficult without gobs of money to throw at it.
