Let PeerTube save and store your original video file so you no longer have to keep it on your hard drive anymore (this option must be enabled by your administrator)
Read the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://docs.joinpeertube.org/maintain/configuration#scalability">scalability guide</a> if you plan to have many users or viewers
Recommended hardware requirements for a big instance to handle 1,000 concurrent viewers (see our <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://joinpeertube.org/news/stress-test-2023">blog post about our viewers stress test</a>):
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 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 should not be a problem with SSD disks, whereas traditional HDD should be accounted for: typical sustained read rates for a well tuned system with a 7200rpm hard disk should hover around 120 MB/s or 960 Mbit/s. The latter should be enough for a typical 1 Gbit/s network uplink.