Every so often, I come across an old blog post or other content with a YouTube video embedded in it. About half the time, it'll have been taken down by a false-positive copyright claim. It seems that YouTube videos can't be permanent, only ephemeral; as a long-term hosting service it simply doesn't function.

Yet another reason not to host on YouTube. Here are some more reasons not to host with YouTube:

- some YouTube videos use nonfree Javascript to implement DRM. https://notabug.org/GPast/avideo/ is a youtube-dl variant that avoids running that JS code. notabug.org seems to be down as I type this, perhaps it will return later. - should you wish to allow your video to be downloaded, YouTube sets up needless barriers to allow downloads. - hosting with YouTube means you and your users are being tracked by Google (which owns YouTube). - YouTube doesn't make it clear how to download the precise video file the submitter uploaded; users get rewritten videos instead. - YouTube only hosts videos, not arbitrary kinds of other media.

All of these problems are easily solved: use the Internet Archive (at https://archive.org/) and your own hosting instead of YouTube. IA offers a download URL which is static and will redirect to your uploaded data. You can use this URL in an HTML5 video or audio element to embed the data in a webpage (again, no JS needed). IA will (by default) rewrite certain kinds of files, but your original uploaded file is also available and machine-determinable (via an XML file that clearly indicates which is the source file and which are derivative files). IA can be used fully without JS turned on (no need to worry about executing code to get files). IA hosting is gratis (zero cost), as is YouTube.

I have no evidence which indicates IA tracks users akin to how Google does.

I encourage you to consider hosting your media with the Internet Archive and your own website instead of YouTube.

How about distributing one's videos through BitTorrent instead? Should scale pretty well. Granted, viewing the video becomes a hassle. But it works.