Exactly, reliably streaming video is much more complicated and expensive than given credit for. YouTube being $0 does not actually mean it's free, it just means the creator/publisher isn't paying for it directly in money, but in skimmed traffic. The viewer pays by exchanging personal data on what they watch and are interested in, as well as their time in watching commercials.

All of these costs are much higher than anyone actually estimates as people incorrectly valued them while YouTube arbitrages the real value in this.

We created an alternative to YouTube for those who have discovered the real value of these costs at Swarmify[1], but there are other options as well depending on needs/wants.[2][3]

[1] https://swarmify.com/ - No code/low code easy YouTube migration option

[2] https://mux.com/ - API based option

[3] https://vdocipher.com/ - Enterprise DRM option

Can you pay to get a self-hostable version? If someone issues a take down, does your policy give your customers a reasonable amount of time to get a fully backup? Have you considered just a CDN option that can connect to local peertube instances and offer to always seed their videos on your CDN for a fee?

Our entire service is based around the belief that you should control the video source files. So while we can auto-import existing YouTube videos, our core belief is that you should provide a self hosted version of the original video files, and we provide a seamless way that will transform that to the 5-10 formats needed for optimal streaming, as well as deliver it over our global cdn. Implementation with us is just insertion of a javascript snippet. And that means that switching away just means deleting that snippet.

You always maintain that source video file and you can easily switch to another provider. You don't actually upload to us at all. You insert our javascript snippet and everything else happens magically behind the scenes.

Storage is a problem too if you're anywhere near YT scale.

Get to YT scale, then solve that problem.

You're going to run into transmission problems waaaay before that.

Bandwidth only needs to be fast for video, aka it can be very cheap.

It's not cheap at all if you intend to create a playback experience that is tolerable to users and somewhere close to what they expect and are used to from existing platforms. If your video has even a couple seconds of buffering/rebuffering from failing to do this, you typically can say goodbye immediately to a percentage of views/users in the double digits.

It's free to you if you make a peer to peer model. Honestly my peer to peer streams are more robust and higher quality than Netflix et al, which usually hiccup and drop quality down to 144p while the p2p stream keeps on plucking at 1080p for the entire run time. Maybe it's p2p buffering more at the start, maybe it's maximizing my available bandwidth, but either way, it is a better experience than what the big players offer and can be done by anyone without huge costs associated with CDNs.

If Netflix is having those problems it's more likely your ISP causing them than Netflix or it's distribution model. You've got a sampling bias simply because your ISP isn't screwing with torrents the same way it is with Netflix.

Torrent streaming has a lot of scaling issues that you've just been lucky enough to avoid. A new torrent will have issues with its initial seeding. A new torrent is limited to the seed bandwidth of whatever seeds have the complete file. The initial members of a swarm can't help each other because they're all downloading the file sequentially so can't really share with one another. They only increase seed bandwidth to subsequent participants in a swarm and only so long as they seed the content.

In the traditional BT model swarm participants download blocks out of order so they can share them with peers. So even the initial members of a swarm can share with one another. Streaming requiring blocks be received in sequential order breaks that peer amplification.

With torrent streaming unpopular content and new content can easily stall or just never begin playback. At a small scale torrent streaming is workable but it quickly starts requiring a lot of infrastructure costs. Long tail content on BitTorrent is virtually impossible to find as popularity required for availability.

Couldnt you fake this? A really good spinner/loader experience, or perhaps a preroll prefetched video while buffering. How i remember netflix in the old days, the DA DANG clip seemed to be a preroll clip before the movie.

Any sort of delay or buffering can affect you very negatively (see: https://mux.com/blog/buffering-reduces-video-watch-time-by-4... and https://mux.com/blog/rebuffering-the-most-frustrating-and-fr... )especially now that most YouTube users no longer are used to it.

Sure, you could do something like you mentioned, but doing this for every single video is not likely to go well. But very clever! And helpful, I'm sure. Not a true solution most of the time.

I do very much enjoy the Chrome side-scrolling dinosaur game that appears when I'm offline, but I don't enjoy it more than once every few weeks :)