If Youtubes ad revenue were negligible to the value proposition of the platform they would not be profitable and they would not give away the service for free.

> I just don't see how you get 24/7, 4k streaming without it being monetised by a centralized corp

For popular video, the cost center is bandwidth, not storage. In that case, webtorrent and ipfs are both capable answers - as long as you can overcome the initial viewership bandwidth early viewers of most online video are power users that will stay around and can be used to seed said video to the broader audience, and as the popularity wanes its likely user availability to act as seeders would also wane.

For unpopular video - esoteric, niche media - I don't think there is a good distributed answer. You want to use something like filecoin as a distributed incentivized data store but it isn't browser compatible. And nobody can come close to guaranteeing the availability of any video anyone wants to upload without resources like what Youtube has.

I guess theoretically you could have a distributed ecosystem of video hosts, akin to filecoin, but where members that have videos required act as http servers to serve the video directly. No central authority would host the video, and the actual host could be compesated by the relaying party. Of course then you are just making a really complicated bureaucratic way to effectively rent rackspace, but it would be at least a distributed one.

But at least half the Youtube centralization problem is solved, and as I demonstrated there are interesting ways to approach the later.

Of course all of these have the problem that western copyright is wholly incompatible with how digital information transfer operates, but thats a larger problem than online video, and its not really a problem you can solve with a technical solution besides repeatedly demonstrating the obsolescence and social / economic harm of the incumbent copyright regime.