Federation will be the only real option considering the massive storage and bandwidth requirements. Even then, once an instance starts to grow, they’ll have to come up with some type of monetization strategy.
Even a low population instance will likely need many terabytes of storage.
I don’t see how federation makes economic sense for video serving/hosting. To do it economicaly you need to have local data centers with peering agreements with local ISPs and good deals for transit. Only big data companies (Google) and huge or specialized self hosts(daily motion, Facebook), can really do it.
Reddit and Vimeo were stupid for hosting video on cloud services for that reason. Reddit wouldn’t have been in such an economic crunch if they weren’t burning money by serving video on the cloud.
I suspect in the long run it will be doable due to advancements in bandwidth, computing power, disk space and compression efficiency but it’s probably more than a decade away.
And even then it might be the case that it’s only viable to do 1080p while the big guns can do 8k at 120fps.
