The other day I watched a infrequently viewed video on how to install carpet on stairs, uploaded by a professional carpet installer (and not some profit generating wikihow crap). I consider this one of YouTube's most powerful features... it's a trove of self help videos for almost everything.

Giving up accessibility and mobile seems like the touch of death.

The better solution, if you don't agree with their new comment policy, would be to migrate to another video site like Vimeo.

That's why I mentioned flattr and patreon.

Streaming though... It obviously depends on the userbase, but I have downloaded feature length videos faster through bittorrent than youtube took buffering the first minute.

Another idea - maybe a middle ground would be pre-leeching episodes. I will want to watch them eventually, so might as well download ahead of time. Best of both worlds. Actually... that's exactly the kind of thing that would kill a centralized service like youtube, but would make a torrent-based service fly.

There are a number of reasons why that might have been in that particular case, but still, an interesting data point.

Not absolutely true. (Though a lot can be done with incentivizing the user base to make it mostly true.)