There's a few reasons.
The biggest reason is that bittorrent doesn't download segments in order. YouTube is a video streaming service, so the video will stop playing after segment 5 if you don't have segment 6, regardless of how many segments you actually have. This is a user experience issue, and it would basically make YouTube unusable for the current use cases.
Peer to peer file sharing, as you might expect, means that other end users are providing the videos, not the company. This means that the company cannot guarantee transfer speed, file completeness, or even that the file is the right file. This may end up causing them some legal trouble in the platform current state.
Peer to peer also means that the videos need to be stored in multiple locations, with multiple copies, and Joe Schmo doesn't have a datacenter in his basement. There will end up being a limit to how much content can be stored, and things that people don't watch simply won't be stored anywhere, so you wouldn't be able to look up that meme video you liked 14 years ago.
It's just not a good way of providing data as a service to a customer. It's an alternative for smaller sites that can't afford, or don't want the paper trail of, appropriate data server sizes.
You can actually just stream media files sequentially via torrents.
It only needs couple* seedboxes by Google to seed the torrents.
for real i thought all these linux users understood the bitorrent protocol better, especially since it has been ported to the browser now for a while. I think people misunderstood my question, but still interesting none the less. I mean in combination with their CDN, like p2p would only save them bandwidth and storage on largely viewed videos.
It is also important as a reason why no streamer streams from a P2P setup.
People stream over mobile data, spotty Internet, or from devices with little storage. That isn't a good base to support a streaming platform.
There are other tech reasons as well, peer bandwidth etc.
But yes. What you said ….
YouTube makes money by selling targeted ads. As such, it needs to control content delivery so it can also control the delivery of those ads.
CGP Grey has a great video about how YouTube's ads business works.
People already filter out ads because they are not mixed in with the video cdns, they come from a different cdn that is easily detectable. If they inermix the ad into the video stream, there would be no difference in the BT stream. Again people are just assuming they give up regular CDN, bt is just supplemental not a replacement, that's obvious for any 100% uptime website aka server.
As far as ads go, AI is the next tech to filter them out wherever they are, within the video itself. Google does this also when it generates tags and thumbnails of women.
Youtube, as in the entire site, is an advertising platform.
Everything the user does is sold to the highest bidder.
Video ads make pennies compared to everything else.
Not an answer to your question, but services like PeerTube use P2P.
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