Depends on how yourtube does the algorithm and weighting their metrics.

Yea, the spiffing brit I think did a couple videos on it. Something about watch percentage was/is based on time watched vs the length of the video so if you watch 2 hours of a 1 hour video it gets a 200% watch rate.

https://youtu.be/29_0_wNR7yY

You can add IPs that are allowed to use it without auth. The software itself is running on your own server.

Plex is self hosting, the auth is not.

That and SSO.

That’s what I did back in the day. When blockbuster closed down I ended up with over 1000 movies and a few bad sets of TV shows. I had to encode low back then as I only had 4tb of space.