I have been toying with the idea of various types of videos, including intermediate level painting videos, video game retrospectives, and some personal worldbuilding project videos. I don’t want to feed the YouTube machine, but also don’t want unsustainable expenses. I’ve looked at a few of the various not-YouTube alternatives but it is difficult for me to get a good read on that landscape.
Minimum expense to you is YouTube, but your videos will be their product which is fine for some use cases.
There are fediverse video platforms, but their longevity is not guaranteed.
You could host your video content on AWS S3 and have it mirrored by the Wayback archive. There is a cost to hosting on S3, but it’s not massive.
I use S3 for my audio podcasts and import them into YouTube, it’s available on archive.org
You can also upload directly to archive.org; not so great for streaming to a large audience, but good for archiving for public access.
This might be something to think about since I’m contemplating making videos I promote directly to Lemmy and/or to my blog subscribers. I want to have a page, but I am not concerned about growing and audience for the profit.
I think PeerTube is ideal if you don’t want to use YouTube. The first selling point is of course Fediverse integration; the second is that it’s peer to peer, so that hosting costs don’t increase much if many people are watching at the same time.
The hardest part is to find a suitable instance (assuming you won’t self host), but it should be doable.
That’s interesting, I didn’t know that.