Pretty hefty work involved in getting it reliable, would be nice for a "drop in" solution.
Its good to see video encoding/storage/delivery maturing; the more players in the space, the more options one has to choose from if a provider prefers to not host your content (whether that's because of a ToS violation, or because the company CEO just doesn't want to host your content). "Drop in" solutions give your provider a great deal of control over your fate, which is okay, until its not.
With Patreon raising a large round ($60MM) of financing [2], I'd expect them to build out their own streaming system based on S3, an encoding engine, and a CDN, versus be under the control of a turnkey provider (a la Reddit having to move off of Imgur).
[1] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/Developer...
I feel like video hosting/streaming is part of their Patron's businesses, not theirs. They just manage the subscriptions.
If I was an investor in Patreon, I would not want them spending my money building out a proprietary video hosting platform.
YouTube apparently blocking links to Patreon (and others) on videos unless they're monetised.
"Here's a fun wrinkle: if your channel doesn't have at least 10,000 total views, you can't monetize at all. Small channels with dedicated Patreon supporters are F'd."
Because a fair number of Patreoneers (this really needs a better name) have private videos for patrons and, if hosted by Patreon, they can do a much better job of keeping them private than, say, making the Patreoneers use YouTube with a private link and hoping no-one leaks it.
It probably also wouldn't be that expensive. Their videos would mostly be behind paywalls. It's not like YouTube or Reddit Videos where they could get a million views overnight. So the delivery cost would be naturally constrained.
