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Funnily enough, I think federation is the only way anything is going to compete with YouTube. If the hosting costs are distributed across the network, it gets a bit more viable.
I could imagine a niche hobby focused instance funded by a patreon that hosts the videos of a few related creators. Perhaps the videos contain sponsorships which the hosting instance gets a cut of.
It would be even better if there was a BitTorrent style P2P sharing from others who have recently watched a video sharing it to other users. A bit tough from a browser, so perhaps in order to watch videos you need to sign up with (or simply just access via) a "viewer" instance that acts as a content cache and seed for other viewer instances.
You'd have a couple of network hops and p2p startup delays to contend with so perhaps the first 10-20s of a video are packaged as separate chunks that can be fetched directly from the source, or perhaps prefetched for subscribed channels on a given instance. I think you could fudge this as being more or less seamless with an HLS stream.
Viewer instances could fund themselves through the usual selection of options, and keep a cap on costs by limiting users. I could imagine a lot of people might self host viewer instances
Sorry that ended up as a bit of a brain dump
peertube already has the bittorrent thing, just not many people watch at the same time. it needs to be easier to seed videos you watch/like without leaving the browser window open
That was my thinking behind the viewer instances that do the seeding once the user has gone away from the browser. It also simplifies the client apps as they don't have to try and set up p2p connections in random environments (imagine someone watching something on their phone via public WiFi)
You - or someone like you - should totally make this happen.
You're so right IMO!
I'm trying with a Lemmy art instance (we'll see how that goes eh), and I host that on a PC, why couldn't I have a bunch of art videos too? I think I can :-)
Of course, those "monetising" youtubers who "has to" "reach out" to millions of subscribers would need something else, but they won't be missed by me anyway...
I'm sorry but you're completely out to lunch, YouTube is barely sustainable as it is and that's without the inefficiency of distributed storage. There's no way you can convince people to give up half their phone storage just to watch internet videos when ad-supported alternatives exist