As anyone involved on the major torrent communities knows, at least some people are willing to share the great artistic achievements of mankind, worthwhile documentary material, etc. You will usually find seeders for the great canon of films, ebooks, all manner of musical genres, etc. So, I assume that for videos that really matter to some loyal audience, at least some people will set aside storage space for that.
However, most of Google’s petabytes of video are inane "cat videos", people’s personal uploads that only ever attract one or two of their friends to look, or shills, and would it really be such a shame if their content couldn’t be hosted somewhere?
Yes? Aside from YouTube shows, one of the big things YouTube brought about was the ability for anyone to post a video online, even if it was just for friends and family. Saying, "Too bad, you're not popular so you don't get to have video hosting" is a huge step backwards.
Couldn't the original poster of said video be the one to seed it if it was so important to them that it be viewable to others. Why is the onus on a company or organization to host personal videos for free? (If I'm misrepresenting your stance feel free to call me on it - but that's what I'm taking away from your comment)
I'm not saying the onus should be on a company to do it for free. I'm saying that because that happened, it was one of the things that made online video really take off.
And, not everyone has the necessary stuff to be able to seed a video like that. A very large part of the world has their phone as their primary computing device. You're not gonna be able to seed a video from a phone on a cellular connection.
Communities would host the stuff that's valuable to them. That's a lot more manageable than trying to host everything on YouTube, and would just lead to instances dedicated to various topics (games, TV, music, sports, etc). With federation, it won't matter that these videos are all hosted across dozens or hundreds/thousands of instances.
Much like email, if ActivityPub becomes prevalent one day, there will be 2-3 main players hosting 80% of the traffic, and then the small independent players on the side. So Youtube will be a ActivityPub-compliant platform.
You could build a peer-tube compatible YouTube-like website. With control over the server, you could collect user data and probably stream ads over peer-tube. So there is possibly a profit incentive to hosting content.
