Isn't the point of a video sharing site so you don't have to worry about the overhead of transcoding, building a player, and distributing/debugging your videos?
Well yea it's easier, but if you don't agree with YouTube's fair use policy it's really not that hard to host it yourself. There are tons of swf players out there.
It's not an unreasonable suggestion. The reason YouTube has this filter in place is because their business model does not allow them to handle the issues with humans -- likewise for the complaint form Jeff filled out.
Thus, while YouTube eliminates overhead, it exposes you to mistreatment by algorithms. If this tradeoff is a problem, hosting the file yourself is a viable alternative.
Why should video be any different from images? I wouldn't consider putting my sites images on imgur, why should I put videos on Youtube?
Because simply "the point of a video sharing site is so you don't have to worry about the overhead of transcoding, building a player, and distributing/debugging your videos". Video formats on the web aren't as standardized as images, at least till html5 catches on, and then there is again a controversy bt. webm and h264.
From SX: it is when you have 130,000 daily readers. 130,000 times ~20 megabytes is ~2.5 gigabytes of bandwidth in a day. I guess that's not so terrible for a few days based on the Amazon S3 cost calculator -- but over the long run, I'd have to pull the video for fear it getting hard-linked elsewhere. - Jeff
http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/6445/web-video-sh...
So if you want to claim "fair use" you have to pay for the bandwidth instead of having google pay for it for you. Seems more then fair.