> Not at all, YT solved it many years ago with ContentID.

Sorry, there is some ambiguity in English about this. I am regarding a "solved problem" as a "problem" (i.e. classification) whereas you are regarding it as "no longer a problem" (i.e. interface). Yes, right now YouTube's interaction with the problem is highly limited (though not nonexistent), but if one is, say, trying to disrupt YouTube or talk about YouTube's history, one still classifies it as a problem in general that exists within YouTube's problem domain.

> Now imagine having to install all the plethora of apps on every device, one for videos, one for music, 500 for different types of documents, etc. Instead, you install a (hopefully) standard-compliant browser, and done.

I mean, I agree that it helps that particular problem somewhat to have a cross-platform virtual machine (the browser) and to distribute an executable (your JS app) on that machine rather than (or sometimes alongside) your content. This also creates its own problems, of course, like simpler browsers (spiders, text-only browsers) not being compatible with your website, as well as some new buggy issues when, say, the JS doesn't load properly. But HTML+CSS+JS is not new in this town and the cemetery has some gravestones -- like the fact that there aren't many desktop Java applications, the complete failure of the Java browser plugin, and the waning of the Flash plugin. It is peculiar among these only because its dreams are less lofty: not "write once run everywhere" but "write once, then write a (hopefully graceful) downgrade path if they do not support the features that I want to use."

>> The violation of IP is a similar problem for torrents and YouTube alike. > > Not at all, YT solved it many years ago with ContentID.

I'm not sure I understand. AFAIK youtube currently makes money (from ads) and much of what people view is copyrighted music that isn't properly licensed, and which yt doesn't pay for.

Sure, some, music is taken off yt, and some content is properly licensed -- but are you seriously claiming that yt isn't (any more) making money from copyright infringement?

There's some digital content distributed via p2p legally -- and it'd not be a stretch that yt owes it's current market dominance to "flaunting copyright law" as the copyright lobby might put it.

If one relegated content (video, meta-data, comments) to torrents/magnet-links (there is an issue of loops in the links in content-addressed systems -- but with a pretty modest central server (cluster) serving up a few lists of magnet-links should be affordable)) -- I think it would be quite feasible to distribute digital media in way which the consumers shared in the meagre cost of distribution through mostly donating bandwidth.

>imagine having to install a plethora of apps on everydevice... Well, I don't have to imagine this because Youtube and Netflix both make you install apps. Flash and silverlight. You can opt-into the html5 streaming on yt, but that's still a change you have to make.