Yes, it can be expensive, but nowhere near as expensive as paying per-GiB rates to a cloud for your traffic (which itself is nowhere near as expensive as paying a cloud's rates for compute if you try to do decode/encode in the cloud).
If we are talking about doing realtime video at large scale, we can assume that there is good ops competency in-house. If not, honestly, what are you doing?
Managing fleets of servers across several of the "automation-friendly-but-not-cloud" providers using modern tools is not difficult for some moderately-expensive-but-not-as-expensive-as-cloud-services ops engineers.
Comments
Yes, it can be expensive, but nowhere near as expensive as paying per-GiB rates to a cloud for your traffic (which itself is nowhere near as expensive as paying a cloud's rates for compute if you try to do decode/encode in the cloud).
If we are talking about doing realtime video at large scale, we can assume that there is good ops competency in-house. If not, honestly, what are you doing?
Managing fleets of servers across several of the "automation-friendly-but-not-cloud" providers using modern tools is not difficult for some moderately-expensive-but-not-as-expensive-as-cloud-services ops engineers.