Kind of surprised nobody is making a strong effort at solving monetization through P2P (lowering costs).

Historically the problem was you had to get people to install an app instead of visiting a website, but now everybody's trying to get people to do that on mobile anyway.

In theory P2P isn't great on mobile devices because they run on battery and have limited cellular data, but devices also allow apps to tell if the device is connected to a charger and unmetered WiFi. And if you only upload from devices that are, that's probably still enough bandwidth to give you a significant cost advantage. Then add in anyone you can get to install the app desktops and TVs, many of which are always on and have fast unmetered connections.

Then offer streaming on the website, but only if you subscribe. The paywall on the website links to the app installer, which is free (with ads).

It's an interesting idea, but I think it actually parallels a lot of problems of residential solar.

How much are you paying for someone hosting? If you're paying them the same as your costs (high), then why not just pay for more servers which will be more reliable? Especially because of the difference between how much bandwidth during peak demand hours, which is probably going to be when there are the most devices on battery, and when you'll need the most servers anyways. The same way peak electricity demand in some areas is after peak solar.

So even if you do 1:1 view time credits, now you're losing money if they upload at night, and watch that same amount during peak hours. Probably what most people are doing. This is what happened with California new solar NEM3 plan that changed the export rates from 1:1. You only get something like 20% credit for the power you're putting in. So can you pay hosters enough to want to host, but not enough that you're better off paying for your own servers?

This doesn't even go into storage costs yet.

There's a cryptocurrency for P2P storage and transfer, Storj. Looks like they even have an S3 compatible gateway, but they don't look that much cheaper than object storage on DigitalOcean or CloudFlare.

The idea isn't to pay them. Nobody gets paid for using BitTorrent, but it still works, because there are people who have "free" bandwidth (i.e. they weren't using it, and if they don't use it, it's lost, so they don't care).

You often hear the argument that people aren't going to "use" their bandwidth and watch ads, but that's dumb. The ads are to pay for development of the app or the content. The bandwidth is to offset what you downloaded yourself. It's two different things. And if you have unmetered bandwidth you're not using anyway, don't be a miser.

But if you really want to give people something as an incentive to upload, show them fewer ads, and give more credits during peak hours. Now, if you want to see no ads, you have to upload something like 10x what you download, and correspondingly up to 10% of users can get that deal. But if 10% of users take that deal, you eliminate your bandwidth costs and still have 90% of the ad revenue. And if more are willing to take it, it means you can give fewer credits until it balances, or vice versa.

Incidentally, residential solar isn't really a problem because you already have non-uniform demand throughout the day. The longstanding solution is to have "peaker plants" that only come online during peak hours. It's only a problem if you want to replace 100% of generation capacity with solar and have no storage solution. But that doesn't stop you from replacing e.g. 50% of generation with solar, and then running other plants less often and paying the fuel savings to the solar generators.

There are also ways to shift demand around, namely through pricing. Make electricity cheaper during sunlight hours and more expensive between sunset and 8PM and suddenly tons of people are doing laundry midday on a weekend instead of in the evening during peak hours. Which also makes it more economical for people who can't avoid peak hour usage to buy an energy storage system so they can run on stored energy when the power company is charging high rates and then charge it back up when power is cheaper.