For video serving encoding technology is good enough that we don't actually have to shovel that much data over the network. Latency is the biggest issue from what I understand.

Most of the amazing work google has done to make youtube fast is the magic behind google's omni-presence established world wide. Like they say in the post they have one datacenter in the EU serving this content. If they used AWS and spun up an instance serving content from every AWS region available the performance would be much better.

I was able to play the video but it lagged a bit to get started until I was able to find peers near me. This is likely a latency thing to the remote host in the EU.

PeerTube should scale much more easily than a conventional site because viewers, I assume, are peers of the content. More people looking at something means more people serving that content. The biggest con is that if you're viewing the video you're shoveling data to other viewers which, previously, you've likely not done.

I hope more people try things like this tech.