There are a good number of channels who have hundreds of thousands of subscribers, combined with the hunger for new content... I think you don't even need to do much incentivizing.

Depends on your goals. Duplicating YouTube? How do you make old, obscure stuff available? bakabt does it by incentivizing users to "adopt" old content in exchange for karma.

I would say duplication of youtube is neither a feasible nor a desirable goal.

So, basically, you're thinking that the Internet as a whole can preserve old, obscure stuff. 90% of the demand is about what's new, and that's exactly what torrents are good at distributing.

There's an initial bootstrapping period before you get to those hundreds of thousands of subscribers, though.

True, but you would have that kind of "trying to establish a viewership" either way - it just also extends it into the technical realm. Obviously the "getting people to watch my stuff" problem is a hard one to solve.