I do understand how torrenting works, it only works because the total amount of upload bandwidth being made available is enough to satisfy the demand for download bandwidth. As you get to larger and larger groups of users, the proportion of people willing to seed after their download finishes drops.

Also keep in mind that most ISPs give their users extremely low upload bandwidth relative to their download pipe, and you have an poorly scalable solution. At least if you're talking anywhere within a few orders of magnitude of what YouTube handles.

While I think the concept of BitTorrent to handle distributed storage is a good line of thinking, I have a feeling keeping seeders alive.

I kind of wish for Pied Piper from Silicon Valley. Distributed sharding with p2p distribution. I can only speak for myself, but my phone has more storage than I would ever need, and T-Mobile 5G is unlimited, just cache the video content as and my phone can serve chunks as a temp seeder until I need that space for new content. With enough people contributing the space needed per person could be negligible. Extending to a federated backend protocol, selfhosters to large organization could contribute block storage as things scale. BBC just started exploring Mastodon. If there was a viable video platform for BBC, their resources would help establish large collective pools of data.

Just keep it a completely open source standard, very strong encryption/compression and wide duplicated sharding across devices. I absolutely hate blockchain hype, but an actual use case would be a blockchain index of where each chunk of information resides.

All of that totally hypothetical, that’s just my “throw shit at the wall” idea for a federated solution. Initial adoption would probably never succeed. Just like in the show, things are getting to incredibly complex solutions once federated networks come into play, explaining it to not computer oriented people would be neigh impossible.