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.
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").
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.
Transcoding can also be offloaded to other machines using <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://docs.joinpeertube.org/admin/remote-runners">remote runners</a>.