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.
PeerTube scales by increasing the amount of instances available. But you are pretty much correct. The two things that’s expensive is: Storage and transcoding. The biggest expense is storage. It gets more and more expensive as videos is uploaded. Transcoding can become more expensive, if you have to keep up with new videos getting added all the time.
I would like to see individual content creators create their own PeerTube servers and thereby serving their content to the rest of the PeerTube servers and the Fediverse. I imagine a lot of content creators keep some kind of backup of their videos, so why not attach a PeerTube server to it? PeerTube allows you to keep the original file.
Regarding financial incentive, the “only” thing creators would miss out on, on Peertube is ad revenue. If we disregard the low amount of viewers on PeerTube compared to YouTube, a creator can still use sponsors, patreon, donations, affiliate links etc. on their videos.