> How expensive is it to run your own single-tenant stream on your own website?
This is a function based on the number of viewers. The ingest and transcoding/transmuxing can be thought of as a fixed cost (and in many cases is free) and those operational expenses become rounding errors once the number of viewers surpasses a certain size. The real cost is egress (bandwidth leaving edge servers) and to a much lesser extent mid-gress (the cost of moving bytes between servers, e.g. from an origin to regional distribution server).
> Is that a bad idea?
Almost certainly a bad idea from a financial perspective. You have a bad bargain here. Either you have so few viewers that the bandwidth is manageable (i.e. no revenue) or so many viewers that there is literally no way for you to afford the bandwidth. If there is a goldilocks zone in the middle it is probably a tiny sliver. You have to have the perfect number of viewers and revenue with very little margin for error.
I remember one popular Twitch streamer (sodapoppin) was doing a QA with viewers where he addressed the question. He had hired some people to figure out the costs of setting up his own streaming server and it didn't work out financially for him. Other streamers have investigated it as well (Destiny?) and came to the same conclusion. If those top streamers can't make it work financially, I doubt anyone can to be honest.
This is a function based on the number of viewers. The ingest and transcoding/transmuxing can be thought of as a fixed cost (and in many cases is free) and those operational expenses become rounding errors once the number of viewers surpasses a certain size. The real cost is egress (bandwidth leaving edge servers) and to a much lesser extent mid-gress (the cost of moving bytes between servers, e.g. from an origin to regional distribution server).
> Is that a bad idea?
Almost certainly a bad idea from a financial perspective. You have a bad bargain here. Either you have so few viewers that the bandwidth is manageable (i.e. no revenue) or so many viewers that there is literally no way for you to afford the bandwidth. If there is a goldilocks zone in the middle it is probably a tiny sliver. You have to have the perfect number of viewers and revenue with very little margin for error.
I remember one popular Twitch streamer (sodapoppin) was doing a QA with viewers where he addressed the question. He had hired some people to figure out the costs of setting up his own streaming server and it didn't work out financially for him. Other streamers have investigated it as well (Destiny?) and came to the same conclusion. If those top streamers can't make it work financially, I doubt anyone can to be honest.