[programjoe]

If I understand correctly from checking out the websites, it looks like peertube is focused on Video-on-demand (VOD) and tackling the problem of content delivery and storage. From a technology standpoint I actually feel pretty good about where VOD is currently since HLS / LL-HLS (the more common delivery mechanism I see and also low latency being increasingly supported) is pretty easy to setup with any video provider (CDN, cloud providers, video platforms e.g. mux, livekit egress).

I do see that peertube is using WebRTC (I'm guessing for the P2P aspect). So I'll tackle the question in the two technologies that might need advancing in that space:

1. Peer to peer should be broken out as its own standard in the browser. Right now to implement peer to peer you're stuck with WebRTC which brings in possibly a ton of features you don't need. Also, if you're trying to use it outside of a browser you're pretty much stuck with using libwebrtc which is the de-facto WebRTC implementation and effectively is an entire networking + application + av codec layer.

2. Storage! This probably needs to be re-designed for handling video in the future. No idea how but the issue I see is that usually for VOD you will want to upload a master. The master file is then transcoded to multiple resolutions / formats and such so that folks can view according to bandwidth. This ends up eating up a lot of space. Maybe we need better ways of storing content?

3. Adaptive bit rate / WebRTC delivery. This is the part that might kinda bite peertube if I had to guess. WebRTC is designed for speed over quality. When ABR kicks in the video bitrate drops and you start getting crappier video. In my experience when people are viewing VOD content they usually want things as crisp and clear as possible. This isn't so much of an issue on a conference call or live streams (usually video degrades before audio). For a peer to peer streaming network I'd have to imagine that you'd want more control on how content is delivered and I'm not sure how peertube handles that.

That's just my thoughts off the cuff though, I'll give it more thought though.

[toomuchtodo]

Genuinely appreciate the time and thoughts. Thank you.