Originally Posted by PowerCum

1 ) My content is already shown with dinamic "antihotlink" link that is set to expire in several hours. So you will hotlink the flv, finish your design, put it online and 6 hours later the link will be expired and your surfers will be kicked to a flv with BIG letter saying "Visit MY-TUBE-HERE" effectively routing your surfers to the correct place (my tube). I can set that expire time to whatever I want. From minutes to months or years. you can link directly the video file with or without my video player, it's completely indifferent.
2 ) All the flvs pulled from any domain other than mine are pulled from a traffic shaped environment that will not disturb my normal tube operation or surfers experience and has already set bw limit per country, so it's not that you can route 500k chinese surfers and cause me some damage. At the moment there are 200 Mbit set for hotlinking. China specifically is set to be able to burn 5 Mbit, USA and EU are at 75 each one and the rest is for all other parts of the world. You cannot burn more than that whatever you do.
3 ) I can affrod 100 or 200 Mbit more, and it doesn't even get noticed in my hosting bill, but the extra real surfers routed from "smart" hotlinkers sites that come to my site never go back to the sites they came from.
4 ) I license all my content, pay the big bw bill and still make very nice profit... without using prepaid ad spots. I don't need to care about DMCA, but you will have to if you hotlink me.

All big tubes have very similar setup, so you cannot cause any real damage to them by hotlinking. If it makes you money, just go ahead and do it