> Hosting video is expensive; a Twitch streamer (Thor) mentioned that an 8-hour stream at 1080p with 8,000 viewers costs Twitch nearly $5,000, while 720p still costs around $1,300.

That's what Peertube is for. The original video comes from a specific web site. If the viewer count goes up, the people watching it also stream it out. So a hugely popular video won't overload the source server.

This is not like Bittorrent. It's not distributed file storage, just distributed streaming. It's only a load on the viewer's system when they are watching the video. Now that there are large numbers of users with symmetrical network connections, this is a practical way to distribute video.

I put technical videos on Peertube because there are no commercial interruptions.[1] I recommend it for content which doesn't need "discovery" service - that is, users arrive from some other source than the hosting site.

[1] https://video.hardlimit.com/w/7usCE3v2RrWK6nuoSr4NHJ