I feel like it would be best to proxy YouTube, or subscribe to paid indie channels like nebula, but without a user base and without ad revenue or subscription revenue I don’t know how quality content can come to PeerTube. Maybe I’m just missing the content but when I’ve checked it’s all very low quality, just random unedited webcam vblogs mostly.
I don’t think it’s entirely fair to say that all money on YouTube comes from ads. IIRC nearly half comes from subscriptions and each Premium watcher is basically worth much more than ad-supported ones. My thinking is similar to yours - creators need to host things themselves and the next step would be creating coops that optimise infrastructure costs and deal with stuff like payment processing for subs. Nebula is one, Floatplane is another but with LTT yuck. We need more, especially non-US based. And people need to sub those too.
You are thinking about channel membership, right? This is something that could also be implemented in PeerTube, either by Framasoft themselves (devs of PeerTube) or as a plugin by anyone.
You mentioned LTT. They have their own video platform. It would have been cool if they had actually used PeerTube and build upon that instead of creating yet another “walled” video platform.
As long as artists need to support themselves in a capitalist environment it’s not reasonable for us to expect them to share their content freely. If we increase the amount of those small walled gardens then big corporations are no longer in control and we can rethink how we can compensate their work but it’s not fair to skip this step.