Streaming terabytes of videos for pennies

A practical walkthrough for hosting and streaming large video libraries cheaply using HLS (M3U8) format instead of raw MP4 files. Compares pricing across Mux, Cloudinary, AWS, Bunny.net, and Cloudflare R2, concluding that Cloudflare R2 offers the best value with free egress. Covers the full pipeline: encoding MP4s to HLS segments with FFmpeg via a shell script, uploading to R2 using the AWS SDK (compatible with R2), building a local UI with Bun for drag-and-drop encoding and upload, and securing videos behind a Cloudflare Worker that checks subscription status before granting bucket access.