[mlsu]

Making something like youtube would be much easier technically than it would have been in 2006 or so. A solo dev could create a small scale streaming service for HTML5 video pretty reasonably.

It's the copyright that's the problem. You would be annihilated, not by YouTube's lawyers, but by UMG and Sony's lawyers, immediately after getting even a small amount of traction.

[rchaud]

That's because people upload copyrighted content.

Nobody would care about Youtube if it wasn't seeded with millions of movie clips and music videos years before the copyright holders got their act together.