[nemothekid]

This is a really amazing insight and something that gets glossed over a lot in the "we need an open competitor to YouTube" comments. $85 for 60,000 minutes watched, thats about thats a cost of $0.001 per minute (or 8.5 cents per hour watched).

For comparison a fairly large YouTube channel makes $0.0005 per minute (or 3 cents per hour watched) just on YouTube generated revenue. Granted YouTube is taking a 50% cut (so they are really generating 6 cents per hour), but in your naive example, even if you had a completely mature programmatic ad platform, you would still be losing 2.5cents per hour streamed.

Video distribution is costly and is likely what is preventing other players from entering into the space.