Taking some simple napkin math, I have a 1min 1080p video downloaded from YT. It clocks in at 15MB.
So, Gamer’s Nexus has 2.6k videos. (That’s insane, btw, but fairly large channel, not even LTT size though).
Assuming just 1080p, and let’s say about 10min average per video. (Some are less, some are 40+), that’s 150MB per 10min video, and that means it’s 390,000Mb (or 380.86GB) for their collection. Assuming I’m wrong and the average is even half of that, and the average GN video is only 5 minutes that’s still 190GB. And that isn’t counting 4k, or the multiple other formats to optimize streaming (720, 480, 360, misc bitrates, etc)
And that’s just storage, not even taking into account compute! (Or egress, or transcriptions, or scaling, or…)
Really for something like Peertube to take off it will require each channel to spin up their own instance, which honestly is just another expense for them, one that Youtube does for them for free, plus Youtube offers to pay them. Which, would cut down on some of the chaff (only people who want to do it would do it), but yeah, I don’t think it’s going to replace YT at any point. Smaller channels can combine for sure, but there is definitely a threshold where it becomes extremely costly.
I’m all for the fediverse, but video streaming is freaking costly and expensive. There’s definitely a reason youtube has a monopoly on it. Now this isn’t to discourage, but more for anyone who may be thinking "yeah why doesn’t peertube just replace it?)