Interestingly, Fran Blanches video actually was suggested to me through Youtube yesterday, the first in a long time, i skipped watching a few in the past. I think it was before the EEVBlog2 reaction video came online, both of which i am/was not a subscriber of.
I actually do (think, i) understand what Youtube is doing there. You can upload videos, and serve a whole community, but factors that decide over growth by suggestions and start page are reserved for creators that do partner commercially with Youtube in so far that they are creating an income for the platform. Everyone wants to have their videos viewed, but to have the platform reserve more or the same resources (attention span, screen area) than for creators with commercial content would be a conflict of interest for Youtube. As much as i can upload photos to flickr, but can not demand that my photos make it to the start page of everyone else. I can link them from whereever i want, though.
Not sure if this is actually discrimination and i don´t get how that leads to being blocked in certain countries like in the blender case, that migh mean it is a strange topic for open source projects.
I would like to see Youtube adopt a hybrid P2P network model in order to reduce their bandwidth costs. Ideally with an official way to make an energy efficient "cache node" using a Raspberry Pi and external HDD. Maybe then give the operators of those cache nodes points for supplying bandwidth, which can then be donated to creators in order to benefit them somehow - either by paying out money or by acting as "votes" for good content. (The latter would likely be more workable since then the "points" don't need to have a monetary value.)
Besides technical issues, like
- the need to transmit the first few parts of a video always first,
- no fast forwarding in the video without changing the upload scheduling of several p2p clients, therefore wasting their cached content,
- the need for much more redundancy in an less reliable net (wasting bandwith by doubling transmissions) and
- residential upload speeds being a lot slower than data center uplinks (network uplink is the bottleneck for overall speed), ....
it would become a question of net neutrality and for that youtube is better off hosting it´s own network than being a lot more dependent on ISP traffic shaping. It gives them a certain amount of bargain power when it comes to negotiations.
I doubt youtube could have gotten that big with a client-side p2p backend (if i understand you correct), the experience would not be the same. Technically, downloading and watching videos this way would obviously work and it would have saved them plenty of bandwith, but it could not have run just in the browser as it does now and that would have driven people off.