It's pretty amazing how well that scales, really. What surprised me the most was, that it also works well for live streams - I witnessed that in action when heise (that huge German tech publisher which recently created their own instance and you may have seen a lot in the trending videos) streamed their live show for the first time. Even on a live stream, towards the middle when I checked, I had more downloaded from peers than from the central server, and more uploaded than downloaded.

I also have my instance set up to mirror a lot of videos from trustworthy, popular instances - and even so, traffic statistics show no issues whatsoever so far, if something really does attract lots of concurrent viewers, the p2p feature handles that quite efficiently.

Now, if only storage was trivial in cost, too, costs for running PeerTube would basically be the same as for text/image-focused Fediverse stuff.

I want PewDiePie to try peertube on his self hosting arc, if only to see what happens with thousands of simultaneous viewers.

That would indeed be interesting to see. Who knows, it might crash everything after all. From what I have seen, it might play out favourably.

I had noticed this channel when browsing the "most watched of all time" list, I have no idea about them and their content, as I don't speak their language, but I assume they probably chose PeerTube as an (additional?) hosting option for content they already had an audience for (seemingly from YT?), probably embedding their videos on an external website with a following?

Any way, back then (the numbers are misleading, btw, because the x years ago lists from the originally-published date, not the date-uploaded), they seem to have garnered thousands of views, so probably easily hundreds of viewers simultaneously. The interesting part: The server they uploaded on has the technical info listed, and that reads very much "laptop at someone's private home".

Unless the numbers have been fudged - which I will grant, is always a possibility - that bodes well for any hosting that's done even just a bit more professionally. It should be able to relatively easily scale up even to thousands concurrently, again, if those numbers aren't doctored. And it makes sense, at least to me - downloading torrents has worked like that for a long time now, too - even for torrents that aren't "professionally" seeded with dedicated servers.

Can you recommend me an instance where I can mirror my YouTube videos?

Last time I checked with them https://peertube.wtf/ had their import script still working. The problem being: YouTube blocks IP ranges that seem suspicious to them, so as soon as you have any professional server, it tends to come with an IP from a range YT blocks, so the yt-dlp + autoimport feature of PeerTube won't work any more.

If you have your videos still as original files ready to upload, and just want an instance in general, or if downloading and uploading by hand isn't daunting to you - here's a good list for an overview - (here's also a Lemmyverse link for instance-agnostic access to the same post.)

Holy shit. I didn't know it could do THAT well.
I thought it transmitted just a few megabytes for a minute of video or something.
Maybe we can become a good alternative to YouTube after all with PeerTube. Just with 4 peers, that is a mind blowing save.

We need the big content creators on YouTube move to PeerTube.

We need the big content creators on YouTube move to PeerTube.