It is actually pretty easy to provide video. It's hard to provide video to a lot of people.
Reddit and Youtube have just a massive number of people visiting and trying to watch video at all time. It requires an enormous amount of bandwidth to serve up that video.
Youtube goes through heroic efforts to make videos instantly available and to apply high quality compression on videos that become popular.
If you don't have a huge viewership or dynamic content then yeah, it's actually pretty easy to setup and run videos sites (infowars has managed it). Target h264 and aac audio with a set number of resolutions and bitrates and viola, you've got something that's pretty competitive on the cheap that can play on pretty much any device.
It's not optimal for bandwidth, for that you need to start sniffing client capabilities. However, it'll get the job done while being pretty much universally playable.
> apply high quality compression on videos that become popular
Do they put a different amount of compression effort in if the video isn't (expected to become) popular?
I don't know what the Youtube compression queue looks like.
I'd not be shocked if they do more aggressive compression for well known creators.
For nobodies (like myself) the compression is very basic. Whatever I send ends up compressed with VP9 which, I believe, youtube has a bunch of hardware that can do that really fast.
Thing with Infowars is, they got a lot of rich people and probably Russia paying the bills. Video hosting still is damn expensive if you are not one of the top dogs.