I don't think that this is a real problem. There's nothing stopping you from downloading a video and emailing it to a few friends, but there's no viable alterna

I don't think that this is a real problem. There's nothing stopping you from downloading a video and emailing it to a few friends, but there's no viable alternative to YouTube as a video distribution platform. If you wanted to take a lot of videos from YouTube premium and share them all with the world without having to worry about bandwidth costs, what are your options? Torrenting is the only real solution that comes to my mind, but that only works for the most in demand media. If you want the long tail, then as I see it, YouTube's (or similarly Facebook's) infrastructure offers the only viable solution, and there's no alternative to paying them for maintaining this infrastructure, either via ads, or via a subscription.