> If you have a good home connection with a decent, no-cap upload, there's no need to pay a cloud provider either.

serving viewers directly from your home IP means they know your home IP, and there's definitely already trends both to fuck with streamers generally, and specifically in games to DDOS people and get them dropped from the game.

Usually the mechanism for leaking IP data is voice chat (since that's often implemented via P2P because game companies are cheap) but you're talking about making your home IP available to everyone who connects to your stream.

"Your computer is broadcasting an IP!" advertisements aside... there are scenarios where that's a problem, specific IPs can certainly be DDOSed off the internet and that means a streamer won't be able to stream anymore.

> since that's often implemented via P2P because game companies are cheap

You implement it peer-to-peer for lower latency, not because you’re cheap.

I think the benefits that twitch provide go beyond just bandwidth. There might be enough bandwidth on a good home connection but onboarding users, building a community, getting sales to advertisers to support the service, etc are all core function that would be quite difficult for a sole provider to handle.