[CobrastanJorji]

It's a good point. I'm very interested in plans to allow recouping of network costs. I'm happy to store my videos on my home desktop or in the cloud somewhere; that's inexpensive. But if a million people want to download my videos in 4K someday? I can't afford to pay for that. Those downloaders might be willing to pay a few pennies each, though. An advertising network seems like the obvious but wrong solution. I wonder if there could be some standardized way of generifying payment for videos, so that users could plug in any combination of ad viewing, direct payments, or whatever as desired, so that the ecosystem around getting money out of viewers could develop independently from the ecosystem for providing content.

[veridies]

I think that you’re fundamentally describing BitTorrent, which allows very wide distribution of large files with very low bandwidth costs. If one’s only goal is hosting videos with minimal bandwidth usage, BitTorrent (and maybe a scheme to prioritize uploading to peers that upload more themselves) works perfectly, and there exist browser plugins to enable in-browser torrent streaming. The problem, of course, is that there’s no way to monetize that, but honestly the vast majority of YouTubers don’t make any money anyway.

[austinheap]

That's kinda the whole point of PeerTube: the people watching your video also become peers in the WebTorrent swarm so no one party ends up eating 100% of the bandwidth cost. To use your example: if "if a million people want to download my videos in 4K" then you will have a LOT of peers in that swarm. The more peers in a swarm the less likely _any_ PeerTube instance will have to serve _any_ video content at all.

TLDR; popular videos are the most likely to have little-to-no bandwidth cost for the content creator/instance admins.

[stev0lution]

Ever heard about Brave or BAT? https://github.com/brave