>Google is incredible at making things cheap

As Curly would say, "Eh, a big cheapskate, nyuk nyuk !" ;)

It's true they do have a "cheapening" effect, especially over time, but Curly's a knucklehead, I wouldn't want to compete with them on their own terms. That's a big gorilla.

>If tomorrow I want to start a platform

Seems like one approach would be to start out with what you can easily afford to begin with.

Which brings me exactly to the bare bones of storing, encoding, streaming and nothing else.

If nothing else to minimize complexity and cost of getting started.

And to possibly obviate the need for monetization up to a point.

To launch, just pick one fairly popular & accessible format/bit-rate and encode all your raw content (or a test portion of content) the exact same way in advance. Afterward, you're done with that phase and free of any need for real-time encoding. You still need to store and subsequently "outstream" your ready-to-deliver content.

It may actually cost you nothing to store a working copy of your encoded content "library" on your own private server on your own designated premises, especially if you already own the storage devices and there is plenty of unused storage space. There are also alternatives that are not without cost, only you could decide if it was worth money or not.

Naturally you will be limited by the bandwidth and infrastructure at each storage location, as to how many viewers at what resolution you can directly serve at one time, and whether or not the ISP/router can be configured to allow outside access to your server.

If you're going to use 100Mbps of surplus upload bandwidth from a business internet account for instance, and your content was encoded at 1.5Mbps (don't even think about 4K), it may be no additional cost to start serving viewers directly from that server, but you would not be able to serve more than about 50 viewers at one time.

That might get you started (at an appropriate scale) with no cash outlay whatsoever, and if the demand was there beyond a few dozen viewers then you could decide to pass your stream along to a more capable content delivery network of some kind, at various incremental cost.

Alternatively, the whole thing could be outsourced and hosted for world-wide access in a turnkey operation where all you do is supply the content. Cost may be a prohibiting factor, it does seem like there are hosting plans with a free tier but not with enough bandwidth to serve a meaningful number of viewers compared to YT.

Fortunately for YT, when they got started they didn't have competition already showing 4K stuff to compare to.

But if the action you take, has cost within the range of what you can easily bear, you could then afford to deliver a completely superior, ad-free experience for your fortunate few viewers. If you wanted to. Something a multi-billion-dollar company seems to be less and less able to afford. What a position to be in. If the whole thing actually was costing you no cash at all you'd be free to make it seem as free and frictionless as YT, probably more so because it was free from the ground up.

>a platform that is supported with Advert revenues

If you did decide to go this route and were sustainable without ads to begin with, you could very judiciously choose your sponsors to be ones that did not conflict with any feature that is more meaningful to the visitors. You would also be financially ahead beginning with the first ad you decided to run. And you could decide to stop at any time.