a) Small artists by definition don’t need a lot of resources (1K concurrent viewers is a huge number (tens of thousands of visitors/viewers per day) and you can serve more than that from a single server), so you’re talking about non-entry level performers (this doesn’t change the validity of your argument, I just want to point out that these are relatively accomplished “entertainment entrepreneurs”)
b) If there is no copy protection, content creators will be guaranteed to make money only during the first showing.
After that anyone can make money by hosting it. Now considering my earlier point a), I probably wouldn’t copy some completely unknown guy’s video, but if someone is generating 5K views a day, I would (well, I probably wouldn’t, but if that became widespread and tolerated behavior, many people would routinely do it).
c) I’ve been reading TFM and it is my belief that the bulk of such workload (SAFEnet reads which are GET-ed by native SAFEnet apps) will be served by caching nodes. Furthermore I noticed that caching nodes don’t get paid for their work and that can’t be disabled or changed (according to @dirvine (I read that somewhere on this forum), that’s something every SAFEnet on the network should do).
I’m still slightly skeptical how up-and-coming artists will be able to prosper with native SAFEnet apps as opposed to the traditional, centralized system.