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 feature is called <a href="https://docs.joinpeertube.org/admin/following-instances#instances-redundancy" target="_blank">"server redundancy"</a> and caches your most popular videos to help serve additional viewers.
The PeerTube P2P system based on well established protocols like HTTP and WebRTC, and the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://docs.joinpeertube.org/admin/following-instances#instances-redundancy">redundancy system</a> are more easy for us to use and to maintain.
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.
These actions aim to propose alternative digital tools to those coming from surveillance capitalism, so that people who do not recognize themselves in such a system can create spaces of freedom.