Video files are big. There’s so much costs involved in hosting, compression, transcoding, distributing across CDNs, and serving, that “free” tiers on those services are just not feasible long-term. Even a multi-billion corporation like Google/Alphabet was only willing to burn cash on that for so long.
PeerTube offloads distributing and serving across the viewers, so the more popular a video becomes, the more “CDN” its viewers provide.
It only has the “downside” of less control and the inability of the platform to insert ads, so all promotions are directly controlled by the content creators themselves, who “in exchange” only need a minimal server to host their videos.
I’d say content is trivial, but having the sheer variety of content that youtube has is not. Odysee has some decent stuff on there- even some decent original stuff that isn’t just a mirror of someone’s youtube channel. But it’s not going to have the same niche, specific content I might look up on youtube.
They are not alternatives because they don’t have content. Streaming video is fairly trivial. Having content is not.
Streaming video is NOT trivial.
Video files are big. There’s so much costs involved in hosting, compression, transcoding, distributing across CDNs, and serving, that “free” tiers on those services are just not feasible long-term. Even a multi-billion corporation like Google/Alphabet was only willing to burn cash on that for so long.
PeerTube offloads distributing and serving across the viewers, so the more popular a video becomes, the more “CDN” its viewers provide.
It only has the “downside” of less control and the inability of the platform to insert ads, so all promotions are directly controlled by the content creators themselves, who “in exchange” only need a minimal server to host their videos.
While it’s been hard to find good stats, something to the effect of several hundreds of hours of video footage is uploaded to YouTube every minute.
Processing, storing, and streaming that is not remotely a trivial task.
I’d say content is trivial, but having the sheer variety of content that youtube has is not. Odysee has some decent stuff on there- even some decent original stuff that isn’t just a mirror of someone’s youtube channel. But it’s not going to have the same niche, specific content I might look up on youtube.