How much would it cost if I wanted it to do these things:

- Be able for members to view and respond to hour long class videos with 1-2min videos of their own
- initially, have 5-7 contributors to post hour long class videos once a week in either 360p or 720p
- design and build a website where it was possible to integrate the subscription thing and have a billing statement after every purchase forwarded to us and the purchaser (much like DC already does) with the video subscription
- have a forum (i know this is reaaallly cheap) integrated with the member log-in (probably less cheap)
- capability to handle more videos and responses as the site grew.

some more stuff, but that's the gist of it.

Is there some sort of platform that I could use for this?

afaik this isn't the correct section, but I'm not sure where this would go anyways.

Are you including the costs it would take to pay the contributors? Or are these contributors going to be receiving a share of the site instead? Obviously this is not something I can speculate on/

Domains are really cheap, hosing would be a couple hundred a month, but there is no reason you can't go with a hosting company that is flexible with their plans, where you can upgrade as you need it, try checking out Hostgator for some good hosts.

Forums are easy, assuming you'll hire someone to do the rest of the work on the site, this is negligable.

As far as finding the talent, websites like http://www.guru.com/ offer freelance workers, and you would have to haggle with them.

Most of the stuff you're talking about falls under either Superior Hosting, or Superior programming, so through Guru and Hostgator you should be able to find both.

yeah contributors would be ~100/vid, so 500/week, 2k a month for video expenses.

wrt: guru.com i tried hiring cheap @ elance.com and i got screwed over hardcore, the communication and product sucked, but it was one of the cheapest competitors (he did have 8 reviews of 5 stars though) think i'll just be going through referrals for this one.