Given how Russian internet is structured it may actually work. I mean the small number might become not so small. You can relatively easy (given the appropriate administrative support) break the download for 1M people at once (a whole city) from a single server.
The upside of this is that you can easily get 20-30Mbit for $20-30/mo from 3-4 competing ISPs in a relatively large city.
All these sites (like IVI and the likes) share the same, very limited, library of content. It is like 10% of Netflix/Hulu, or even less. But potentially sure, I agree.
Also, given administrative support you can simply cap the outgoing traffic to one tenth of incoming. Nobody can seed efficiently any more, so the whole experience becomes suboptimal.
The upside of this is that you can easily get 20-30Mbit for $20-30/mo from 3-4 competing ISPs in a relatively large city.