I know you jest, but it’s not beyond the realm of possibility for some peer to peer system to exist, similar to bittorrent, which could distribute the load across viewers. Most people have half decent internet these days. This imaginary extension could recognise the YouTube video URL, check it’s DHT to see if anyone else has it, and if not it could capture the YouTube video and redistribute it to the next person who looked up the same URL. Stale videos could be deleted after a time.
So, basically torrenting but for YT videos. Pretty interesting on the technology side on how you’d handle unstable seeders, because after all it’s streamed content, which is different from your regular content you’d get.
Now I realized YT videos buffer anyway.
One could even dedicated a set amount of disk space for sole use of downloading videos automatically that server says they should, which could be algorithmically decided whether it’s needed due to high demand (need more seeds) or sort of archiving.
Could be an interesting project, a decentralized youtube “archive”.
