The advantage of YouTube (and other platforms) is its video catalog: from knitting tutorials to Minecraft constructions through videos of kittens or holidays... you can find everything!
Setting up a new livestream is like uploading a new video. The default setting will get you one PeerTube URL, one video container (with description and thumbnail and tags...), and one RTMP Key for each of your livestreams. This setting is useful if you want to host multiple lives simultaneously on you channel. When your live is finished, it will be replaced by the replay (if both the instance admin and the content creator have activated this setting).
The federation system, for its part, allows hosts to decide with whom they want to connect, depending on the types of content or the moderation policies of others.
The more the video catalogue is varied, the more people are interested, the more videos are uploaded... but hosting videos from all over the world is (very, very) expensive!
Since PeerTube's launch, we have been aware that every administrator and user wishes to see the software fulfill their needs. As Framasoft cannot and will not develop every feature that could be hoped for, we have from the start of the project planned on creating a plug-in system.
Since version 1.0 has been released last November, we went on improving PeerTube, day after day. These improvements on PeerTube go well beyond the objectives fixed during the crowdfunding. They have been funded by the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://framasoft.org">Framasoft non-profit</a>, which develops the software (and lives only through <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://soutenir.framasoft.org">your donations</a>).
The other big advantage of PeerTube is that your hoster doesn't have to fear the sudden success of one of your videos. Indeed, PeerTube broadcasts videos with the protocol <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent">WebTorrent</a>. If hundreds of people are watching your video at the same time, their browsers automatically send bits of your video to other viewers.
So if our plans for 2021 and PeerTube's v4 don't match your priorities, that's completely OK, but we won't do more nor go faster. Remember that you are free to fork PeerTube to lead it in another direction, or to contribute by coding plugins and issues (<a target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://docs.joinpeertube.org/contribute-getting-started">get started on contributing here</a>).
So we need your help to share the roadmap around you, and get the word out about PeerTube. Feel free to share this project in your blogs, vlogs, podcasts: some of you have already done so, and it helps us a lot (plus it really warms our free-software-lovers' hearts)!
So we plan to take some time from this third stage of development to create such a web interface and put it online. Of course, this code will be free so that others can publish their PeerTube search page with their own choice of instances to index.
There already exists free/libre software that enables you to do this. But with PeerTube, you can link your instance (your video website) to Zaïd's PeerTube instance (where he hosts videos of the lectures for his people's university), to Catherin's (who hosts her webmedia videos) or even to Solar's PeerTube instance (who manages a vloggers collective).
