A great thing about PeerTube is that in order to reduce hosting costs, it uses WebTorrent to reduce the load in case a video starts being watched by a large amount of people. For those unfamiliar with the technology, here’s how it goes:
If you are watching a video and are the only one watching, PeerTube works like any video platform. You just load the video from the server and play it. It gets interesting when more than one person watches the same video. Instead of having everyone download the video from the server, the browsers of everyone watching the video will start communicating with each others. If there is a part of the video that one watcher has already downloaded that you don’t have, instead of loading it yourself from the server, your browser will ask the other watcher to send it to you, reducing the load on the server. Similarly, if you have part of a video that an other watchers doesn’t have, you will be the one sending it to them. The server is used only when nobody is able to provide for the part of the video you need.
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