I would transcode myself. All you need is ffmpeg and a bit of code to manage the input and output files and to call ffmpeg. You can scale as needed. One VPS can do a lot of work. I am doing it myself.
Then you'll need storage(wasabi, backblaze, idrive) and CDN. Bunny CDN or Beluga CDN are, i think, one of the cheapest. Or you can build your own(I did), in case the CDN would pull too much data from origin and cause you increased costs as wasabi gives you only 1:1 egress with stored data and backblaze gives you 3:1. By that I mean that the CDN might always get the file from origin instead of sharing the file among its own nodes. So the origin would experience increased egress.
You can also rent a beefy storage VPS instead. For example, 2x 500 GB NVMe SSDs + 4x 22 TB Enterprise HDDs + 50 TB Bandwidth@2x 1Gbps costs 159€/month.
There are various ways how to do it and in the end it is up to you to pick what works for you the best. Mostly how much work you want to do yourself, how good are your programming skills and how much money you are willing to spend going forward.
I was transcoding myself when running it on the homeserver, but the convenience of Cloudflare stream doing the transcoding is tempting. Will definitely look into this, thank you. Hadnt heard about Bunny CDN till this week. Actually I am moving from a homeserver to my own rackmount in a datacolo in about 2 months so may take this route.
Then you'll need storage(wasabi, backblaze, idrive) and CDN. Bunny CDN or Beluga CDN are, i think, one of the cheapest. Or you can build your own(I did), in case the CDN would pull too much data from origin and cause you increased costs as wasabi gives you only 1:1 egress with stored data and backblaze gives you 3:1. By that I mean that the CDN might always get the file from origin instead of sharing the file among its own nodes. So the origin would experience increased egress.
You can also rent a beefy storage VPS instead. For example, 2x 500 GB NVMe SSDs + 4x 22 TB Enterprise HDDs + 50 TB Bandwidth@2x 1Gbps costs 159€/month.
There are various ways how to do it and in the end it is up to you to pick what works for you the best. Mostly how much work you want to do yourself, how good are your programming skills and how much money you are willing to spend going forward.