You bring a lot of really good points to the table. I'll share this with a student of mine who has a big YT following and a Steemit account that she never used.
You mention Dtube and Dsound , and I haven't personally tried them yet because I heard that the blockchain may not be able to handle streaming video that well. Is this true, or are there just some kinks to work out?
Pretty much any time I watched a video on dtube, the video suffered major buffering at some point >_<
Ya, that's what I've heard as well. I think if a workaround can be achieved, there's great potential here.
Well, Ausbitbank and I are working on antoher dtube server. Gonna try to help improve the process.
That would be awesome!. If you need beta testers, let me know! :)
One of the main issues - probably more important that the server is also video conversion/compression. If you upload a 2.5 GB video to YouTube then You-tube has massive server farms that will crunch the fxxx out of it and create multiple resolution playback, so that you get that sweet almost instant playback on any device from a mobile phone up to a desktop computer.
So one of the problems you are going to have isn't just the server issue, it's about educating people to encode their videos properly upfront unless there's some way a blockchain could scale video compression as some kind of proof of work algorythm for miners.
I just don't see how you could match YouTube's resources for compression. That's the problem for us with watching DTube in Australia ie. it just doesn't play and it would be a lot better to see a lower res version of the film playing, than a hi-res version that only plays a couple of frames. People wont adopt Dtube En-Masse until the playback rates are fast.
Currently some Dtube videos run fine and some don't which is all about the file size that the uploader put up.
So instead of trying to match You Tube's compression/conversion abilities instead why not just make it so you can only upload videos already converted to MP4 at whatever exact encoding Kpbs rate gives the smoothest Dtube Playback. It would be far easier to adopt one standard for uploading for now, than to try and fix the problem just by increasing server abilities.
3 years from now when Dtube has massive resources and there are massive blockchain servers that can crunch encode any file size like YouTube has in near realtime then this won't be an issue, but for now putting a limitation across all Dtube uploads so that Dtube only take files that play smoothly would greatly increase the user experience.