Yup. YouTube is going to be dead to me in the not too distant future. I am making my peace with that. It will annoy everyone and even me, but I am starting to download videos or at least audio from videos so I have the files on my own hardware.

AS for hosting, I couldn't possibly do that with the horrific upload speeds I am subject to in the wilds of Maine (at least until I decide to spring for a starlink, which is cool, but they are still changing terms and there are still not enough competitors to make it cheap), and so I keep leaning towards some kind of VPS service to handle the heavy lifting. I just don't want to pay for that in perpetuity.

So . . . if you build a client that serves the videos to a client on a 1-1 basis, that is nearly impossible to scale, which brings us back to the monetary incentives to host files, which I have yet to see work. (See IPFS and other such protocols.)