Five instances, and what each one needs.

You publish on a schedule and your back catalogue is the asset. What you do not want is for that catalogue to sit inside a recommendation system you cannot see, on terms that change without notice.

So you run one 4 vCPU box, put a CDN in front of it, and embed the player on your own pages. Your channel is addressable over ActivityPub, so people can follow it from wherever they already read.

A few dozen members upload and a few hundred watch. The technical part is not the hard part — the hard part is that you are the person who answers for what appears on the instance.

Registration approval keeps signups behind a human. Per-user quotas stop one enthusiastic uploader from filling the disk, and ClamAV scanning is a flag rather than a project.

You run several channels under one instance, and some of what you publish is live. A council meeting, a launch, a recorded interview embargoed until Thursday — each has a different audience and a different moment.

RTMP ingest takes the stream, privacy-gated HLS controls who can watch it while it runs, and the replay becomes a VOD without a second workflow. Embargoed material sits behind a scoped playback token rather than an unlisted URL.

You have four years of talks and every one of them has to stay findable. Nobody browses an archive; they search it, half-remember the title, and give up if the first result is wrong.

Hybrid full-text and trigram search with typo-tolerant autosuggest is the difference between finding a 2023 keynote and not. Whisper captions make the spoken content searchable as well as accessible.

Your catalogue and audience no longer fit the launch profile: encoding queues back up on release days, and one machine is a single point of failure that you answer for.

The image you installed on day one splits into roles — api replicas behind a load balancer, worker hosts for encoding — with object storage as the canonical store and a CDN with purge in front of public media. What is not built yet — multi-CDN steering, studio DRM, multi-region — is written down in a public roadmap with decision records, so you can judge the distance before you commit.