LTT storage is excessive. He stores all his footage in full quality instead of just storing his final edited videos in a compressed format. Plus if you're a youtuber with millions of subscribers you can afford to pay for a few TB of storage to hold and serve your videos. Its not that expensive.

Not just storage, but bandwidth. Streaming one video to potentially thousands of people at once can get very expensive.

Storage? Traffic is the real cost

As someone who worked for years in video transcoding, archiving, streaming, and content management in general: there are absolutely ways to do this efficiently in a self hosted context. You could absolutely build a system that fits your bespoke needs in all of these categories.

Hosting a peertube instance would be almost nothing I comparison to this. It'd just be a duplicate of all uploaded videos at worst, which he's storing many times that amount of raw footage anyway. They probably wouldn't even notice the overhead.

its fine if its first and foremost a backup, and not a public platform. then you don't need the bandwidth. then they can open it up when google deleted their channel. they still need to figure out the capacity issues, but at least the content was not lost.

its fine if its first and foremost a backup, and not a public platform. then you don't need the bandwidth. then they can open it up when google deleted their channel. they still need to figure out the capacity issues, but at least the content was not lost.