If you are a poor kid, you upload your interpretation of a Bach piece and get slammed by an injust, extralegal pseudo-copyright mechanism, that’s in essence an attack on human culture..
Why do you think that a dozen of startups in the space remaining after a possible youtube demise won't be burdened by the same policies? I think that the copyright lobby would try their best to tighten their control at a time when a huge corp stopped throwing its weight against them.
What youtube gives to the poor kid is instant and free access to a huge audience. Yes, it's comes with an (admittedly not really high) risk of a false positive and blocking for copyright reasons. I suppose the kid is smart enough to also have copies of the performance on other services, and safely stored locally.
Oh, they absolutely would! Every music streaming service is already beholden to a tiny record industry cartel, even though there are a number of music streaming services.
But it’s simple, video is more versatile, and by removing youtube’s monolithic dominance, you remove the single point of failure that copyright cartels have been able to attack.
As an example, imagine a separate youtube-clone dedicated to education that was actually willing to fight for fair use! Or a youtube that didn’t automatically demonetized you for swearing.
Internet already gives these kids (and the rest of us) both access and audience, we have just been stupid enough to lock large parts of our cultural heritage into corporate silos, protected by “intellectual property”-laws. Competition wouldn’t solve this completely, but it would make it harder to distort the market.
That's basically what PeerTube tries to do. It doesn't work well in practice for most people and organizations that try it because most videos only have 0-1 watchers at a time.
Thanks @cannabis_sam, never thought of this but yes absolutely. The tech is slowly getting there... but innovation would speed up a lot more if there was a significant enough pain (and therefore significant enough upside).
MIT and Khan Academy could easily host their content using BitTorrent and reduce their bandwidth usage by 95% ( https://nrkbeta.no/2008/03/02/thoughts-on-bittorrent-distrib... )