It occurred to me that Plex has a broad user base and distributed storage. Many of us have fiber-optic or other high-speed internet access. And many of us are not just cinephiles, many of us make our own content (or used to, in my case).
A number of attempts have been made to compete with YouTube, but they fail when attempting to scale to YouTube’s capacity. But if we’re using our own capacity and storage, the issue is a lot easier for the service to deal with.
So, the idea is: what if Plex allows users to share original content from their own server to the wider world? Pick a folder or drive, add content to it, and allow Plex to share it much like a YouTube video. Plex could subsidize it with advertising just like YouTube does, and share the revenue with videos that get more views.
Obviously, there have to be some guardrails. There would need to be automatic detection of illegal/adult/etc. content. Likewise copyrighted content would have to be prohibited (within fair use guidelines). But this would offer users who already create YouTube-friendly content (and maybe some stuff that YouTube doesn’t like but for which there really shouldn’t be an issue) a separate channel on which to offer their material.
There is the issue of popular content overwhelming a users’ personal internet connection. Even at 1GB fiber-optic, a 10-minute long, 4K video would limit the number of users who could access it, even when in a compressed format. For content that becomes very popular, and with permission from the user, Plex could replicate it to its own servers. But if it doesn’t reach a minimum threshold, then it would stay on the user’s personal server.
