Self-hosting some very niche videos? Sure. Trying to make a generally popular channel? Forget it.

It's the transfer and bandwidth that are the problem. There isn't really such a thing as "unlimited transfer" (there's a hidden limit past which they'll rate-limit you, and kindly ask to stop or pay more). Moreover, once your video gets somewhat popular, you'll hit bandwidth issues. Given how popularity on the Internet seems to happen in spikes, this will likely severely limit the reach of your video.

People are also spoiled by big video services with unlimited budgets and CDNs all around the world.

That's an issue Peertube [0] is trying to solve by having viewers contribute back some bandwidth via webtorrent.

[0]: https://joinpeertube.org/

If you want your media to be readily available despite your limited bandwidth the answer is torrent. If you still want to have control on who does what, then you're out of luck.

True. Unfortunately, there's another problem with p2p: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19937861.

It is quite unlikely that the "unlimited" traffic you are paying for is truly unlimited. There is always a catch with such "unlimited" offers.

Also consider their automatic video encoding / re-encoding / resizing; I think there's services (e.g. Amazon Elastic Transcoder) that can do that for you, but that would require some development time of your own.

Is there a single video format supported by all browsers yet?

Those things are easily done with tools like ffmpeg and mbox. This stuff isn't rocket science. These are all solved problems and the tools are free and open-source. And yes, there are video format that are supported by all browsers.

The number of naysayers that are implying that working with videos is so hard in these comments is shocking to me for such a supposedly technical group of people.

It's better to keep in mind that promises of unlimited traffic usually countered by fine text provisions, which your hosting company will invoke once your website starts to be a nuisance for them. Various companies have different levels of tolerance, and actually it's a sort of problem with these "unlimited" offers that you won't know when it hits.

I asked them and for up to 40TB/month it's okay. This is 80000 views of 10 minutes full hd video. The chance that someone gets this popular is quite small.

If you are really really popular investing in a cdn is likely the only solution and for this you need some money, be it from advertising, donations or memberships. But this is the same on Youtube too, only that Youtube does the advertising for you and takes a cut.

Try it. Also there is Cloudflare doing a video CDN. I don't think they have a free plan with that, but it would be interesting to see what the costs actually are. There should not be a need for a CDN though if you are only showing a few videos to a few people. Video does the buffering thing so it should be possible to serve video half way across the world.

I would give it a go myself but I only have audio!

No, it's not difficult to do at all. Another commenter said "if you manage to somehow self-host your videos..." Somehow manage to self-host videos? They make it sound as difficult as managing to somehow write my own web browser from scratch. Self-hosting videos is relatively easy. The benefit of youtube isn't that it can somehow host my videos.