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.
It really isn’t. I can get a gigabit pipe and all the storage i can cram into a 4U for a few hundred a month. That is enough to serve several dozen users. Add on a CDN and now you can serve thousands or more. I can probably find 10 or 100 gigabit offerings for not much more.
The bigger issue is copyright. A site that gains traction in the video space by ripping youtube videos would get sued into oblivion.
Storage and bandwidth are practically free though. Only last mile bandwidth is expensive, and that is paid for by the end user.
Thankfully that isn’t a choice you have to make, and thanks to open source, you will ever need to make.
The only trick Google has up their sleeve is their web integrity work. Even then, there will be workarounds.
People think I am full of it when I say that my household income (largish household with kids) is a quarter million a year and we are basically living like we are middle class. Money just doesn’t go as far as it used to.
As a millennial, I never would have imagined working my way up to this point only to find I can’t even buy a house. Oh sure, I could make the bare minimum down payment and get stuck with a super high mortgage payment, but if I lose my job or become disabled or unable to work, we would have no way to pay for it.
Groceries, housing, and insurance costs have more than doubled for us since 2019.
Slightly off topic. A lot of public schools already get free meals thanks to federal education dollars. The school lunches are free in my area because of this, even though the (red) state won’t act.
The state has attempted to kill off those dollars in the past.
@eek2121
@lemmy.world