Eventually, people will have to run ads on their own websites, the same as before Youtube. There will be a lot less video content because serving video is a tough thing.
It won't be so cheap if those cloud providers have to charge you the cost of the liability they're incurring for your potential copyright infringement.
You're absolutely right! It's certainly going to become cheaper and easier to host video!
With that said, is it perhaps possible that the problems publishers of content struggle with are in the main not those of the nuts and bolts of publishing? Perhaps, even, that these problems (content discovery, gaining access to users, analytics, ad management) might be well-addressed by platforms?
We could start a company that indexes websites so that they can be discovered. To help them monetize their content, we could also design an advertising platform that didn't require any special contracts or business clout to join. An advertising platform that was based on the words on the webpage - we could use it to fund the discovery side of our business. Let me call up my Stanford buddies and we'll get going. I know a guy named Eric that might like this idea.
