It's not because of DMCA requests, it's because of lawsuits like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._YouTube,_Inc https://en.wikipe

It's not because of DMCA requests, it's because of lawsuits like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._YouTube,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._Y.... Even if Youtube was in the right, it would take years and multiple appeals to get to that conclusion and then Viacom still appealed so at some point Youtube just decided to settle, it was cheaper. I believe that means that in the current legal environment it is not cost efficient to provide free hosting of third party videos, ad supported, without draconian/significant number of false positives content identification system that is made available to the biggest potential "suers". Thus, even if a competitive service would appear, if it needs to be profitable using the same format it would likely end up implementing a similar (or worse) system. But I'd be happy to be proved wrong.