Do you happen to know if there are any project or talk of not archiving the video content itself, but instead the transcripted content instead? I feel that this would be very advantageous to archive knowledge based (versus delivery based, such as prank and stand up comedy) videos much more efficiently than the videos themselves.

Someone below brought up a very good point about many of these videos being much longer than they need to be (mainly for reimbursement and ad reasons). If the transcripted content can be archived, it could also be abridged and/or summarized as well as being combined with other similar video content as well.

I'm sort of thinking as I go here now, but I would think that perhaps Youtube has an API that lets you access the closed captions of videos?