[nostrademons]

Yeah, dedicated is definitely the way to go if you can afford the ops staff. Actually, if you're really big and can afford the hardware engineers, building your own DCs and computers is the way to go. I've seen the profit margins of some major cloud providers; they're insane. About the only industry more profitable are the telecoms.

I was targeting my comment toward a startup that'd likely be building a product like the OP suggested, though, with maybe a dozen devs who are all generalists. Setting up a bunch of EC2 instances to pull videos out of SQS/S3 and run them through ffmpeg is something an ordinary full-stack developer can do in a morning, and scaling it up just involves clicking a button. Running and scaling a dedicated server farm reliably usually needs a dedicated ops person to keep it all working.