This incident was discussed in the 30c3 talk on Tor. Roger Dingledine stated that Microsoft removed the botnet, but left Tor installed. Therefore the headline that Microsoft deleted Tor is not correct. You can watch the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJNxbpbHA-I

YouTube is a great place to find videos, so it's also a good place to promote your video with either a clip or a trailer.

However, you don't need YouTube to host your video. You can host it yourself very easily and inexpensively. If you care about quality or if your video is too long for a YouTube clip, then this is an even more attractive option.

Cross-platform, cross-browser support is very simple these days. Encode your video as a QuickTime MOV file using the H.264 codec. QuickTime Pro can do this for your easily and cheaply and does a good job with the encoding. If you want to do this with open source, you can do it with Handbrake or even just ffmpeg.

MOV/H.264 is playable by Flash 9 (fullscreen, with hardware-accelerated scaling), so it should play back in all the browsers on every OS. Just code up a simple web page with a download link and an open source Flash video player queue to play your video. If you encode it at a reasonable bitrate (QuickTime Pro has a good preset for this) then the bandwidth cost should be low.

If making the web page with the Flash player and download link and then uploading it to a server is too much trouble (and really, why should filmmakers have to bother with this) then the product I'm working on, Ringlight can help. It's a very small file-sharing application that you run on your desktop. Whenever you drop a movie file in your shared it automatically generates a web page for the file containing a thumbnail, download link, and embedded Flash video player (with fullscreen, of course). This is all hosted on the Ringlight website for you, so you can just send people the link to the page. When they go to download the video, it will download it directly from your computer, so you don't need to pay for bandwidth on a server. Users that download your video can volunteer to help you out scaling your bandwidth by becoming mirrors of the file, donating their own bandwidth. There is also an option to host your file on S3, which you can activate by just checking a box.

My service can help you if you want to scale up from peer-to-peer distribution all the way up to a massive audience and you don't want to bother with the details or pay for a server. However, if you already have a server and are willing to do a little website work then hosting it yourself may still be a preferable alternative to using a video hosting site since you can have total control over the quality and length of the video.