I think that part is easy, but making the tech stack affordable is the problem. Serving a 5Mbps stream to 10,000 users for 8 hours a day is 120TB of data, and if you do the naive thing and just use AWS for that, you're looking at egress costs in the range of $180,000 per month (that's 5 cents per gigabyte). So you need some specialized solution, and that spirals into being a hard problem for content creators to solve.
Having said that, you can certainly build a CDN that pays less than $200k/month in transit costs (the ISP I worked at charged $1000/month for 10Gbps IP transit) -- obviously that's not what it costs Twitch to provide the service. But then you start hiring software engineers and network engineers to build all that, maybe take some VC funding because you have an actual business model and tech stack now, maybe sign some advertising deals to placate your board and attract more streamers that want revenue share, and then the advertisers start being upset about content, and you create a content policing team, and boom! You're Twitch! You ban someone, the Internet hates you, and all you have to show for it is a 8 million dollar per month AWS bill :)
Thought long and hard about how to build an open source tech stack for streaming video and somehow monetize it, and it always seemed like either I would become Twitch, or I'd just be UNIX helpdesk for some gamers with million dollar AWS bills. Didn't do it, but I wish those who are doing it the best of luck.
Having said that, you can certainly build a CDN that pays less than $200k/month in transit costs (the ISP I worked at charged $1000/month for 10Gbps IP transit) -- obviously that's not what it costs Twitch to provide the service. But then you start hiring software engineers and network engineers to build all that, maybe take some VC funding because you have an actual business model and tech stack now, maybe sign some advertising deals to placate your board and attract more streamers that want revenue share, and then the advertisers start being upset about content, and you create a content policing team, and boom! You're Twitch! You ban someone, the Internet hates you, and all you have to show for it is a 8 million dollar per month AWS bill :)
Thought long and hard about how to build an open source tech stack for streaming video and somehow monetize it, and it always seemed like either I would become Twitch, or I'd just be UNIX helpdesk for some gamers with million dollar AWS bills. Didn't do it, but I wish those who are doing it the best of luck.