Hosting video servers in Aotearoa

In the thread on Engagement with Māori Digital Sovereignty Work, I said;

To which Dave replied;

How much would it cost them to put a programmer or two on the job of helping BitTorrent clients support for WebTorrent? As I understand it, that would allow video storage to be done on a swarm of home computers around Aotearoa. So the PeerTube server wouldn’t need to store or send the videos, just provide the player for the WebTorrent swarm effectively served from those home computers.

Sorry - a little late to this. As far as I know, Peertube does support bittorrenting of videos by default… so don’t think you’d need to add programmers. Just keep any Peertube instances up-to-date :slight_smile:

Also, for Peertube instances hosted on commodity Linux VPS hosting overseas, it’s possible to get instances that come with 5TB data transfer allowance built into a $15/month hosting fee… so it’s dirt cheap in other jurisdictions. It might make sense to host such things overseas.

Only for downloads, not seeding. See;

From a purely financial POV, as things stand, it certainly does. What I’m interested in exploring is;
a) why is currently costs less to serve video about Aotearoa to people in Aotearoa from overseas than it does to serve it locally?
b) what software freedom and digital sovereignty advocates might be able do to help rectify this situation.