Are you hosting video or publishing it?
These are different products and the distinction decides everything else.
Hosting means the video plays inside something you built — a course platform, a product page, an internal knowledge base — and you need encoding, adaptive bitrate delivery, a player you control and no advertising for someone else's content. Bunny Stream and api.video do this, priced by usage.
Publishing means an audience arrives at a destination and browses. That requires discovery, recommendation, comments, subscriptions and a monetisation model, which is a platform rather than infrastructure. Dailymotion and PeerTube are this.
The expensive mistake is embedding YouTube for hosting. It gives you a free CDN and costs you a competitor's recommendations at the end of every video, an advertising layer you do not control, and tracking applied to your visitors that you are responsible for under the GDPR without being able to change it.
For a business embedding video in its own product, dedicated infrastructure at €1 per 1,000 minutes is both cheaper than it appears and considerably more controllable.
What does video infrastructure actually have to do?
Four things, and getting any of them wrong is visible to the viewer.
Encoding: turning whatever a person uploaded into a set of renditions at different resolutions and bitrates. Adaptive streaming: switching between those renditions as the viewer's connection changes, so the video degrades in quality rather than stopping. Delivery: serving from a node near the viewer, because video is the most bandwidth-hungry content on the web. And the player: a consistent interface across browsers and devices that you can brand.
Bunny Stream covers each with encoding, adaptive streaming, a customisable player and delivery over Bunny's global CDN, plus DRM for content that must not be downloaded and live streaming. api.video covers the same ground with an API-first design, SDKs for the common languages, and analytics.
The part that catches people out is that these are not optional. A single MP4 served from your own origin will buffer for anyone on a weak connection and fail entirely on mobile data, which is why "just host it yourself" stops working the moment the audience is real.
How does video pricing actually work?
By storage, encoding and delivery separately, and delivery is almost always the number that matters.
Bunny Stream charges from about €1 per 1,000 minutes, which is unusually simple and unusually cheap — a course platform with a few hundred hours of content and moderate viewing pays very little. api.video prices from about €49 per month with a free tier, which suits a product embedding video where predictable monthly cost matters more than per-minute optimisation.
The trap is egress at scale. Video is heavy, and a video that unexpectedly does well can produce a bill that is a multiple of the previous month. Check whether your provider caps or alerts before it happens rather than discovering it afterwards.
PeerTube inverts the economics entirely with peer-to-peer delivery: viewers watching the same video share it between themselves, so the more popular a video is, the smaller the share your server carries. That is what makes self-hosted video financially viable at all, and it is genuinely clever rather than a marketing claim.
What is federation and does it solve the YouTube problem?
Partly, and it is worth being precise about which part.
PeerTube instances connect to one another over ActivityPub, the same protocol behind Mastodon. Someone browsing one instance can see and subscribe to videos hosted on another, so a small instance is not an island — the audience is the federated network rather than only your own visitors.
What that solves is control. No central company decides whether your video is monetisable, demonetises it after the fact, applies a recommendation algorithm you cannot see, or removes it under a policy written for a different jurisdiction. You run the instance, you set the rules, and the content is on your server.
What it does not solve is discovery at YouTube scale. The federated network is small, there is no recommendation engine pushing your video to people who have never heard of you, and PeerTube is honest that discovery is a limitation. If your growth depends on being recommended, federation removes the mechanism you were relying on.
PeerTube is developed by Framasoft in Lyon, free and open source, with no advertising and no tracking by design.
When is a public platform still the right answer?
When you need an audience that already exists and a monetisation route you do not have to build.
Dailymotion is the European public platform: video hosting with an embeddable player, monetisation and advertising, analytics, live streaming, API access and content moderation, from Paris under EU jurisdiction. For a publisher or creator who wants a destination with an existing audience and an advertising model, it does what YouTube does without a US-established company holding the relationship with your viewers.
The honest position is that Dailymotion's audience is much smaller than YouTube's, so it is rarely a replacement and frequently a second distribution channel — publish in both places, own neither.
Dailymotion also serves publishers and enterprises directly with player technology and advertising infrastructure, which is a different product from the consumer platform and where a lot of its actual business sits.
The general rule: use a public platform for reach, use infrastructure for anything embedded in your own product, and do not confuse the two by embedding a platform player into a page you control.
