I think this is super interesting, and a really good idea. But as others have stated in this thread, very costly.
However until technology catches up, maybe we could have an interstitial federated platform. One that’s super decentralized. Like 90% of the users running their own instance, decentralized. Anyone with a NAS can host they’re own vids. Then the other 10% that are willing to host high bandwidth, high capacity servers, can work as caching for the most popular videos.
Honestly, people generally have more compute power than they need. If this proverbial platform came with an efficient transcoder, then the files just need to be hosted.
The torrenting scene is alive and well with users fronting the cost and taking legal risks. Many torrents have enough speed to actually stream the content while it’s downloading. Hard to say now… But if somebody set up a solid peer-to-peer solution, I think it has a chance.