I think the largest challenge though is maintaining the distribution and managing the associated upfront costs.
Existing large content producers could likely afford to handle this but new producers could struggle paying to seed their content.
Though I do think overall this is more achievable than people give it credit for:
YT videos don’t need huge bandwidth for a sustained period; only for short bursts. Most views come in within a week.
Content is probably localized to specific countries. Less need to replicate across the globe.
Let the source prefer to seed the highest quality and other peers downsample and replicate as needed.
Doesn’t need YT scale. Tons of YT “content” is spammers leeching essentially free hosting from YT. No one needs to seed their videos if they don’t want to.
1080p is still fine for YT videos. h265 is very efficient (though downsampling 265 isn’t great). Don’t need 4k for most videos.
I think the largest challenge though is maintaining the distribution and managing the associated upfront costs.
Existing large content producers could likely afford to handle this but new producers could struggle paying to seed their content.
Though I do think overall this is more achievable than people give it credit for: