I think bandwidth hasn't been cheap since up till very recently. Cloudflare's R2 seems like a game changer here, before that you'd be paying a hefty fee to host your videos if you have a decent size following.
There's also the network effect: nobody will find your personal site without some kind of cross-site interaction. ActivityPub and friends try to change that, but I haven't seen it take off yet because nobody seriously considers switching to such a model.
I'm watching what Floatplane is doing for the video hosting landscape; they seem to run a pretty bare bones operation (though they often run into limitations in practice, i.e. routing problems with some networks, transcoding equipment, dynamic quality, etc)
There's also the network effect: nobody will find your personal site without some kind of cross-site interaction. ActivityPub and friends try to change that, but I haven't seen it take off yet because nobody seriously considers switching to such a model.
I'm watching what Floatplane is doing for the video hosting landscape; they seem to run a pretty bare bones operation (though they often run into limitations in practice, i.e. routing problems with some networks, transcoding equipment, dynamic quality, etc)