I imagine the non-popular videos are sent directly from central servers. By offloading the most popular spikes to P2P maybe they're able to reduce costs enough to make it worth it.

To add to that, there's also the fact that any user of any ISP that throttles/blocks torrent traffic is probably going to have the same experience. Plus the fact that there's at least two people I know whose ISPs actually cut users' down speed by double of any up speed (in order to "passively" cut down torrenting without actually restricting it). So PeerTube becomes less a YouTube replacement and more an interesting implementation of streaming video via Bittorrent (which some clients already support).

Unless you're a very big player handling excessive amounts of users, the bandwidth involved doesn't need to cost an arm and a leg.

I can see why private individuals might prefer something free, but for organizations or other professional actors which are publishing high-quality video-productions, they already have a budget, and frankly the BW cost is probably going to be the smallest expense on their list.

And when they risk losing their platform and audience at a whim (as we've seen Google do repeatedly to certain types of organizations over at YouTube), I can't see why more people don't consider other options which leaves them in full control over their own content.

I mean, given what Blender is, having tutorial videos accessible by anything other than desktop browsing isn't a hopeless or horrible thing. Every Blender user has a desktop or laptop (or has modded something to heck and back in order to run Blender), so having it be somewhat difficult to access a majority of their videos by mobile, TV, console, etc, might not be such a big loss.

That's pretty neat. I wonder what happens if it starts to being used like youtube. I see the top LP has 37k views, that's about as much as a video from a medium tier youtuber.

The cost of storing/processing/serving videos is quite high.

On a side note, I have finally gotten youtube red in my country and I immediately signed on. Will it send money to the "demonetised" videos that can't have adds or are they screwed out of youtube red money as well?

I was expecting some crappy 90s interface that was just a static listing of links to download videos or something like that, but this actually looks pretty good.