A general understanding on how to scale massive video platform is well understood now more than ever, but it still remains a very efficient way to burn cash. To give you an example:
I own an ISP and about 2 years ago, we got first GGC node (basically youtube CDN), they are provided free by Google to ISPs as long as you are willing to host it at your own expense and you meet a certain bandwidth requirement, I think it was 1gbps youtube traffic at that time. Anyways they send us free 3 fully stacked Dell R720, shipped it us from another country. To the best of my knowledge, each of them cost 5kUSD. Total throughout after saturating ~30 Gbps, we will be given 3 more of these. In our country, to the best of my knowledge, there are 40 ISPs who have these nodes. A least 5 of them have 2 full racks worth of these servers - all free paid for by Youtube/Google.
This is just one country. Investment still remains an insane task for video hosting.
I own an ISP and about 2 years ago, we got first GGC node (basically youtube CDN), they are provided free by Google to ISPs as long as you are willing to host it at your own expense and you meet a certain bandwidth requirement, I think it was 1gbps youtube traffic at that time. Anyways they send us free 3 fully stacked Dell R720, shipped it us from another country. To the best of my knowledge, each of them cost 5kUSD. Total throughout after saturating ~30 Gbps, we will be given 3 more of these. In our country, to the best of my knowledge, there are 40 ISPs who have these nodes. A least 5 of them have 2 full racks worth of these servers - all free paid for by Youtube/Google.
This is just one country. Investment still remains an insane task for video hosting.