The ambition remains to be <strong>a free and decentralized alternative</strong>: the goal of an alternative is not to replace, but to propose something else, with different values, in parallel to what already exists.
The difference to YouTube is that it's not intended to create a huge platform centralizing videos from the whole world on a single server farm (which is horribly expensive).
The web browser generates a random string to identify the viewer during the browser session and periodically notifies the server that a user is watching the video.
This means that anyone can download and install PeerTube to host videos on a specific domain name (this is called "hosting a PeerTube platform/website").
