Your comment made me think of a web portal for uploading videos, so the content creator uploads once, and selects what content platforms he wishes to share it with.

The people behinnd the portal could have a sign-up page so that any platforms that wish to host a non-exclusive copy can sign up in order for uploaders to be able to select them as well. This could potentially cause the portal hosters (internet archive?) to suffer a lot of upload, but then there are no legal troubles whatsoever (assuming the uploader had the copyrights) in preserving or migrating content.

The big networks might refuse to sign up (to prevent such a portal and hence competing content networks from getting a foot in the door regarding network effect), or make it hard to have the single portal entity mediate the uploading to them in the name of the content owner, but in a sense it is not more cat-and-mouse game, but a differently placed one: at upload instead of download.

Tunecore does a similar thing for music: https://www.tunecore.com/sell-your-music-online

You upload your music, and they put it on the various services for a fee. Including YouTube if you select it.

This would be indeed nice. Which means, obviously, that they would be immediately buried in lawsuits. Sure, they would be in the right, which would make them happy after they're broke.

(Cynic, who me?)

What constitutes "important and desirable media" is extremely personal and subjective, and the producer will not always be available to respond to your request.

Here's an example of something that is very important and desirable to me but doesn't exist anywhere else on the internet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd_p2B8ReqE

I agree with you overall, but the album actually does exist here: https://yadi.sk/d/SMKn5Af43LitRc. At 320 kbps, it's a little higher quality than YouTube.

By the way, Diamond Harbour is fantastic. What other music do you love?

Well I’ll be. I’ve got a vinyl copy now so I’m in good standing quality wise.

You should check out the Growing Bin web store - there are some fascinating musical rarities and curios there. There’s some great stuff on Jamie Tiller’s label Music From Memory. His mixes (available on Soundcloud) are also excellent, as are those on the Red Light Radio Soundcloud. I could go on...

Do you not realize that you've linked to a YouTube video of a recording of a vinyl record?

In your case, the vinyl record is the other source. Not to mention the other one provided by the other respondent. And a vinyl record is a great source to have -- it will last a lot longer than any other digital link to a stream of a record, if cared for properly.

>Important and desirable media is almost always available from more than one source

We don't watch "important and desirable media" in YouTube (and most of us, not anywhere else, there). What we do watch is not really available elsewhere (e.g. certain vloggers, tutorial videos, etc).

You must have a pretty narrow definition of 'important and desirable', almost all of the content I consume on Youtube is not available elsewhere afaik.

I don't think pewdiepie uploads elsewhere, and his videos are important and desirable for 63 million people.

It is possible that this is true only insofar that they are readily available. If Youtube becomes difficult for his fans to access for some reason, they may find that they can live without his content.

That’s the same reasoning of ‘just ask people to use iMessage/Telegram/Signal’. Most people, whether they are producers or persons you want to talk with don’t want to deal with learning an extra platform. Don’t get me wrong, I love Telegram and YouTube not being the only player would make for a healthier market, but it just doesn’t work that way. I mean, how many people do you know that are not on WhatsApp? Its so ubiquitous market penetration is something like 90%+..

I don't know, because I am not on Whatsapp and it's never come up with any of my friends. Nobody thinks any less of me for this, and nobody has ever asked me to get Whatsapp. Perhaps my friends are nicer than others' here, but what ever happened to respecting people's choices?

We live on the internet, a place of infinite possibilities and uses. To suggest that it is natural, convenient, and appropriate to pigeonhole our services in this manner is thoroughly antithetical.

This is not feasible for the majority of users.

I follow ~360 YT channels, I desire them very much and they are not uploading it anywhere else.

Why don't you try asking them?

Nonetheless, I am sure that you could live without any of the content hosted on those YouTube channels. The word "content" is a fair terminology in this context since if any media is so pigeonholed as to demand being streamed and served from YouTube, it must not be that artistic, thoughtful, or useful to most viewers. YouTube doesn't optimize for utility, art, usefulness, tact, expression, or value. It optimizes for addiction.