Start a party or hijack the European Pirate Party and win a majority by promising to spend part of the broadcasting budgets on an European social video network.

Use social pressure by letting all teens pressure their parents, grandparents and neighbours to vote for you with the promise of making that network available to them while all other parties work on shutting them out.

Unless someone coughs up a few billion euro, no. Hosting video on any sort of scale is incredibly, incredibly expensive.

Is there anything we could try to get alternatives to YouTube?

Yes, you can pay for it.

If you want “free” then you’re going to be stuck with the same ads, tracking and enshitification. If you don’t want any of that, you are going to have to crack open your wallet and pay for the privilege. As an example (not an EU one), there’s Nebula which is ad free, owned and operated by creators, free of AI slop and mostly free of the usual dross the youtube algorithm pushes. At the same time, it’s scope is pretty limited (predominantly science and edu-tainment type content). And there is little guarantee that they will survive and/or grow. I personally have a subscription and keep hoping they succeed, but I also don’t expect them to reach anything like the scope of YouTube.

And that sort of thing brings with it another problem: a lack of democratization. One of the things YouTube does is allow nearly anyone to put something up. While the algorithm is hardly kind to new or niche creators, it’s still entirely possible for some random person to start posting cat videos as dramas in three acts, and maybe that takes off. With the siloed services, that’s never going to happen. Maybe they won’t insist on some sort of editorial input, but they are also going to be far more selective in what they platform. So, there is a trade-off to be had.

There is also the BBC model, with a publicly funded service. You’re still paying for it, but it’s not directly controlled by a corporation with it’s shareholders to serve. Though, there might still be the question of opening up the platform for more “niche” creators.

Upvote for the last sentence:

On the other hand, on a smaller platform more people have a chance to be seen.

I thought about how to convince people to use the Fediverse and people always reply “there’s so few users, nobody will see my content”. But that’s in fact not true, because it has few users, your stuff has a higher chance to be seen.

Well, there is Peertube. But as mentioned scaling it would be really expensive. So propably a lot of money for Framasoft would help.

If you’re willing to pay, Nebula is a streaming service setup by creators, without any ads or data harvesting/selling. The revenue goes directly to the creators. Their offer is still small, but quite a few creators I followed on Youtube I now follow there.

The thing to understand is that YouTube can pay creators without taking money from viewers because it shows you ads, tracks you, and is backed by a huge corporation that can spend lots of money just to stay #1 in that space, and can deal with copyright claims.
There can be no free alternative without ads and tracking.
Even if someone rich enough paid for it with no expectation of profit, as soon as it got too popular, an armada of lawyers would descend upon them to shut it down.

The only real alternative is following creators you like on their Patreon, but then you have to pay them for creating content.

The last decentralised alternative that was somewhat successful was LBRY, but the US government shut them down.

I’d love to see an alternative that uses IPFS, it seems like an ideal way to distribute videos.

I always wondered if folks could just take what plex does, only repackage it with a federated concept. Then the actual infrastructure and website can be signed off to trust or nonprofit or coop with poison pills to ward off the billionaires.