XKCD #86 says, "Dear Sony, Microsoft, the MPAA, the RIAA, and Apple: Let's make a deal. You stop trying to tell me where, when, and how I play my movies and music, and I won't crush your homes under my inexorably advancing wall of ice." That is Munroe's commentary on the ultimate futility of digital rights management (DRM). Turned around, content creators may do better cooperating with their consumers rather than fighting them.
Along similar lines was Clark Howard's radio show in roughly 2012. He released unrestricted (no DRM) MP3s 2 - 3 days after the live broadcast. The MP3s contained ads. Clark once explained that the ads were needed to pay the cost of the mass distribution bandwidth.
Perhaps the situation has improved since then, but this is Clark Howard who is supposed to be a town crier of innovation. The obvious-to-me solution is / was to grant a license. In his case, the license would give anyone the right to capture / record the show and edit out commercials; no other editing would be allowed. Then a distribution right is granted after the 2 - 3 day waiting period. His listeners would distribute the show with no cost to him. End of problem.
File sharing technology is wondrous. It would make T1 lines unnecessary. Well, it would make T1 lines for the web unnecessary. Related technologies could support specialized video hardware without T1 lines: for example, DNS pointing to a load balancer to route streaming requests to an army of volunteer machines.
I have recently learned of a content creator that distributes through several of the popular specialized video hardware devices but is not on the web. As with Clark Howard, I suspect the proper open licensing would get them on the web, free to them, very quickly, *and* make money.
On a related point, my understanding is that if someone uploads a Hollywood movie to YouTube, YouTube "knows" where the content comes from and pays the creator, not the person posting. This likely involves registering a video with YouTube, but that shouldn't be hard. If I'm right about that, encouraging people to post to YouTube would be another way of solving the the problem and perhaps making decent money.
YouTube has of course gone to the Dark Side from roughly 2016 to present (2021). In the current context I'm considering, that may or may not be a problem. Within the relevant subject, there is a sub-issue that would get "them" kicked off YouTube on a rocket sled if they took the "wrong" position. I have not figured out where they stand on that issue, or if they just avoid it. Other than the one issue, YouTube would welcome them. Their content is up there with kittens. (And, come to think of it, the exact same sub-issue applies to kittens.)
Upon further thought, even if they were on the "wrong" side of the sub-issue, if the videos were on multiple channels, YouTube probably would not eliminate all of them. As of roughly mid-2020, YouTube was not thorough about this. They may or may not be getting more thorough.
If they take the "wrong" position, they would be welcomed, for the moment, on BitChute and Rumble and a number of other platforms.
If I owned relevant content, I debate myself between a (non) license that says "For legal purposes, this is public domain. For ethical / moral purposes, see the following." And then the other option would be to encode "the following" in a license. "The following" would be items like: 1. A volunteer distributor should (must) post links to the content on a specific web form; this would allow other users to find the content. 2. send contact information to the creators to figure out how to collaborate, etc. The idea is to "leverage" viewers into partners.
Canonical distributes Ubuntu Linux and other free software, but they also make money. Linus Torvalds does not appear to be hurting for money, and he is still in control of the Linux kernel. XKCD is released under a Creative Commons License. I doubt Munroe is hurting for money, either. I hope there are many such models, and I'm reasonably sure there are, but I have not gone digging at those details yet.
I suspect "they" could even get viewers to help them edit or even do much of their editing, just like Linux as been created by 1,000s or 10,000s of "gnomes" over the decades.
Another option for the current scenario is to run a non-profit org parallel to the existing for-profit entity. The topic lends itself to non-profit work. That would allow tax-deductible donations. A related option is for viewers to buy content or make a donation after the fact: the content is distributed freely, but viewers are encouraged to contribute. I tend to think that singers and such would make more money with a model that encouraged distribution. Another thought is that viewers buy / donate a subscription even though they get content without one, similar to NPR, below.
Here is how I would change their pledge drive model: Rather than pledge drives, they would occasionally refer people to a given web page. On that web page would be the "dollar" amount needed by a given date before a given show was canceled or moved to a 3am slot or even when the whole station would shut down. The amount would assume a graceful shutdown with severance, selling the buildings, selling the broadcast license, etc., including many months or more of buffer.
Every time I mention XKCD, I have to call Munroe the poster child for the idiot savant. Unfortunately, his idiocy is becoming increasingly dangerous on literally a global scale. Perhaps one day I will explain that in full. I don't think I'm self-censoring so much as I don't want to go down too many rabbit holes at once. I'm also dog whistling to people who will already understand. Munroe implicitly calls himself an idiot savant in many cartoons: that's a running theme. He sees himself as an idiot for the wrong reasons, though.