Just get a dedicated server with 100mbps unmetered bandwidth:
about 65$ a month for 100 mbps unmetered = ~ 30 TB a month
and you just ask your friend to set up a basic web server on it to serve files from.
Sure, can do that, but one problem is that it's not a CDN, and is likely not optimised for massive user video streaming. What happens when 1000 people (or more) try to download the latest episode at once?
That's one advantage of a purpose designed CDN solution like Libsyn
I will agree with you, a single dedicated server on a 100 mbps port will not handle beautifully 1000 people downloading at the same time. If 1000 will download at the same time, you'll get about 80-90 mbps split between 1000 users, obviously... each will download at 20-50 KB/s
You just have to ask yourself :
1. do you really think you're going to have 1000 users click on the download button at the same time?
The RSS feeds don't push the new video to all people at same time, most have the rss set to refresh once every 10-20 minutes or so, they don't all click on the download link the moment the update pops in the feed etc ... you'll probably have 1000 people spread out within about 20-30 minutes to an hour, making it much more manageable.
You could also do some tricks like using geolocation to delay the rss feed for some regions .. ex australia gets the rss post instantly, us gets it 10 minutes later, eu gets it 20 minutes later... this way you'll spread those 1000 users a bit... who cares when in the day user is notified of the video?
2. do you think the large majority of users will care whether the download speed is 5 MB/s or 100-200 KB/s?
A video is maybe 50-100 MB on average.. even at 100KB/s that video will download in 5-10 minutes which isn't that much. A lot of people have slow connections anyway so they won't really be bothered by the slow speed.
Youtube encodes videos at 360p and 480p at about 600-800 kbps.. that's about 80-110KB/s. Basically you could set rules in the web server to limit each user to about 150 KB/s maximum speed and you'd guarantee nobody has issues even if he/she streams the video directly from your server without downloading it in advance.
The apache server has filters already that you could configure for example to allow a burst of a few MB when user starts downloading the file and then if the server serves lots of users it can throttle down the connection to 100-150KB or more to keep everyone's download at a reasonable speed - this assures that if the person tries to stream the video directly he/she has a big chunk initially to watch.
Anyway... even if you want to think in advance, there are offers for dedicated servers with 1 gbps ports that aren't so expensive
In fact I plan to upgrade one of my servers at Swiftway to one of their latest offers published here:
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1280239&highlight=swiftINTEL Xeon E3-1240 4 Core / 8 Threads
RAM: 16GB DDR3 internal memory
HDD: 2 x 128GB SSD or 2x WD 1TB 3.5 7200rpm 64MB SATA
RAID: Optional - see optional upgrades for details
Bandwidth: 1 Gbps port with 10TB monthly bandwidth package
IPMI 2.0 with Integrated KVM/IP with remote media support
Datacenter location: Netherlands or Chicago, USA
105$ for server with 1 gbps port with 10 TB included, 30$ for each additional chunk of 10 TB you add to the server.
Leaseweb offers something a bit more expensive and with lower performance hardware but with 100 TB of bandwidth at about 115$ and up :
http://www.leaseweb.com/en/dedicated-servers/100-tb-servers Basically the catch is that it's a "volume network", meaning you may get up to 300mbps-800mbps depending on how loaded the network segment is, and each connection will average at about 400 KB/s to 2-3 MB/s depending where the user is ... their "premium" network can do even 10-30MB/s download speeds.
CDN is much more expensive than such offers because they're not really designed for what you want to do... a CDN's idea is to have the files you serve cached/spread out on various servers around the world and when user clicks on download, he gets the file from a file closer to him/her.
CDN is great to store javascript files, website images, logos, ads etc to keep a website responsive and fast... for videos.... use a cdn to serve a video ad so user won't feel like skipping it because it loads slowly... but the eevblog videos, I don't think speed matters that much.
I doubt these video downloads are that time sensitive and that viewers care so much about speed that you'd have to resort to such premium solution like a CDN.