cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/5294605
Youtube, for so many years, was just too good. Yes, they changed the 5 star rating system to likes and dislikes and a few years later disabled dislikes altogether, but their algorithm mostly digs up interesting content and it just works for creators and viewers.
This might change soon. Their new strategy to disallow ad-blockers will frustrate a certain kind of viewer. Those who dislike surveillance and like open-source tech, those who use uBlock Origin and know why.
Just like a few years ago mastodon suddenly reached a certain kind of popularity, because twitter had their first big fuckup, maybe Peertube is next. It certainly is the most polished decentralized solution that doesn’t use a blockchain. Creators or fans could easily host their own videos, fans can watch it, without ads.
380 GB in storage for multiple years of contents is really not much. I archive that amount every 2 months.
The real problem is serving all that content to the viewers, and the first bottleneck is usually the upload bandwidth.
I think the more interesting number would be to know how much data would it be to upload an average sized video to every viewer of it.
Using your example of a 15 MB video, serving that to 300.000 viewers means uploading roughly 4,5 TB data, plus some for technical data (TCP/IP and HTTP headers and such). For every (average) video! Now that’s a lot!
Fortunately PeerTube helps with that: viewers will automatically upload their downloaded chunks of the video to the others currently viewing it, so in the end the server needs somewhat less bandwidth usage.
Other than that, it would be the perfect place where channels could team up to host shared instances for themselves, or every channel their own one but with redundancy set up, so that their friend channels could also chip in with the bandwidth when needed.