Thanks for your thoughts and insights @hueso! In theory, I would much prefer to use IPFS as well, but in reality - it has had major issues . On both DTube and DLive. I haven't heard "paying for long term storage" with a percentage of the payouts as an option - is that something that is currently available to content creators - or are you suggesting it as a potential solution?
How DLive will pay for centralized hosting - i'm not sure. This is something i've actually been really curious about and i'm sure they will share more details on as they move forward.
Paying for long term storage is already happening at D.Tube since its launch, it is described in its introductory post. D.Tube is relying on a centralized service (@ipfsstore) which is in charge of the long term storage and is receiving a fraction of the payouts for this job, and it is failing at it. So the problem comes from a centralized hosting failing, not IPFS.
BTW when you add a video to IPFS it doesn't get split into different computers. What happens is that any computer that grabs your video (or a piece of it) is immediately able to retransmit it to another computer, just like bittorrent. So the more popular a video is the more bandwidth it gets. Otherwise a centralized server would be clogged if many people were to watch a video at the same time, not to mention the bandwidth costs. (Storage is costly but also bandwidth).
I'm glad DLive is tackling the video availability issues and I hope this helps to bring more users to the platform but we are barking the wrong tree if we blame IPFS for those issues.