You seem to want to have your cake and eat it too. Either you'll have popular, copyrighted content for free (fixing "high costs for cable" and "limited distrib

You seem to want to have your cake and eat it too. Either you'll have popular, copyrighted content for free (fixing "high costs for cable" and "limited distribution on Netflix's"), which will be contributory copyright infringement and will promptly get you sued. It's not enough to respect DMCA requests. After you're sued, if your service will be considered created mostly for copyright infringement, you'll loose (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popcorn_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popcorn_Time, or Mega). Also, you can't implement DMCA in a "completely decentralized" system. You need a database of blacklisted content, one that clients respect and cannot be changed by just anybody. I.e. you'll have to be the one managing it. If you don't have popular, copyrighted content for free, then there will be no users and because of that, there will be no creators of original content and no advertisers. Google maybe is not paying much, but they are the only ones that have enough users and advertisers to pay anything at all. Also, I don't see advertisers signing in if there's even a distant smell of it being used for copyrighted content.