You may not be aware of this, but like everything on PeerTube, the video we are commenting on here is in fact served up via BitTorrent. I got about a third of it from the diode.zone seed, which, if I understand correctly, is paid for out of Micah Scott's Patreon.

The inefficiency of torrents on near-symmetric internet connections is pretty minor. If a 1GiB movie is on Netflix, each user has to download 1GiB of data over your internet connection. If it's in a torrent, each user has to download 1GiB of data and also upload 1GiB of data. The efficiency difference is only a factor of 2. And the 1GiB of upload bandwidth was, in many cases, idle anyway.

(Well, there's also the fact that the users are paying the cost of distributing the movie, rather than Netflix paying part of it. So you'd think that information that benefits the people who receive it, like Linux, porn, and sewing and soapmaking tutorials, rather than the people who produce it, like advertising, would tend to be distributed by torrents. But, for a commercial setup, this is a minor consideration; even ordinary hosted servers pay relatively little for bandwidth, and Netflix probably pays nothing in most cases. I suspect Micah Scott ended up paying about 10% of the cost of me watching this video, not counting the value of my time.)

So... if I watch a copywritten video on peertube, the MPAA might sue me for being a peer and distributing it?

This is actually a really important question that we need an answer to.

Legal or not, the fact that many people host and share dozens of large torrents from their home servers for free belies the claim that sharing video would necessarily be too expensive to be practical or would devolve back to turn off the century RealVideo quality.

the legality matters a great deal because if you steal the IP obviously even cumbersome technology becomes viable.

Cartels don't use drug mules because they're such a fantastic feat of logistics but because hiring a freight train is somewhat problematic

How's it inefficient?

because decentralized systems need to redundantly store data, a lot. Youtube accounts for, depending on the source 15% of global internet traffic.

The reason you can watch videos at 1080p wherever you are in the world buffer free is because the system is ridiculously optimized, cached locally, and so on. Do you want to go back to 180p because one of the two guys hosting that five year old video with 50k views you liked just went offline?

Your second paragraph disproves your first, do you realize that? Youtube caches locally in a decentralized fashion, with redundant data, etc.

IIRC, both Windows Updates as well as Steam use delivery systems that are very similar to torrents.

Blizzard used to distribute updates using bittorrent before the advent of CDNs.

To be totally fair, Akamai predates BitTorrent.

Everyone used to but almost no company does anymore. It's easier and more effective to just let each ISP cache the content of highly downloaded files.

You mean, pay Fastly or Cloudflare to run your swarm for you, instead of running it yourself on your users' computers?

Which isn't too expensive if you have paying customers. Doesn't make people angry when they are on data cap or trying to do something else on their network. Also doesn't have to deal with endless NAT and middlebox issues.

But often ISPs will willingly host the content for free since it saves them money as well. Steam and netflix have caches inside ISP datacenters.

> illegal movies

What's illegal movies?

Here's an example of a movie declared illegal in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magnitsky_Act_%E2%80%93_Be...

The Wikipedia article doesn't mention any banning, and I can buy the film on Amazon.

Maybe Barrin92 is in the People's Republic of China, where movies criticizing the government are illegal.