The CDN isn't just about volume, it's about location and bandwidth. It doesn't matter how many users you have, if the user is in Uganda and your server is in California, the video will never load immediately.
And even then, how would you create a homebrew CDN?
Sure, you could buy bandwidth, storage and processing capacity in multiple DC providers around the world and build, deploy and maintain your own solutions, at which point you're essentially becoming a small CDN with significantly higher costs as you don't have the efficiencies of scale and 100's (or 1000's) of multiple customers.
> The CDN isn't just about volume, it's about location and bandwidth. It doesn't matter how many users you have, if the user is in Uganda and your server is in California, the video will never load immediately.
But isn't it true that as long as you can send >1s of video in 1s, it doesn't matter? I.e. latency doesn't matter much in video streaming, and bandwidth doesn't need a CDN for the 30 users / hour case?
Also, latency probably doesn't matter for 99% of sites, which are already so bloated with JavaScript and other pointless content that processing time dwarfs the connection delay.
It matters, latency means buffering to start a video, plus rebuffering every time you move to a different point in the video.
> Also, latency probably doesn't matter for 99% of sites, which are already so bloated with JavaScript and other pointless content that processing time dwarfs the connection delay.
Indeed, but then CDNs also dramatically reduce the cost. It is far cheaper to serve an user in Jakarta from a server in Jakarta than from London. And even cheaper if the server is sitting in the ISP's core network in Jakarta.
The Internet as we know today couldn't exist without CDNs.
And even then, how would you create a homebrew CDN?
Sure, you could buy bandwidth, storage and processing capacity in multiple DC providers around the world and build, deploy and maintain your own solutions, at which point you're essentially becoming a small CDN with significantly higher costs as you don't have the efficiencies of scale and 100's (or 1000's) of multiple customers.