What is Peer Tube?

PeerTube is a practical answer to all video-tubes that centralize our data and attention. With it, videos can be hosted by the people, with the people, for the people.

PeerTube is a software anyone can install on a server, to get a data-friendly video-hosting platform, called a PeerTube Instance. PeerTube combines:

○ A free-libre license, that guarantees code transparency and legally allows you to use and contribute to the software;

○ A federation system, to widen the audience of the videos you host by syncing your instance with the ones you choose to (within the federation);

○ Peer-to-peer streaming, to make streaming resilient and fast  when a video goes viral.

Today, it works…

In November 2017, we raised donations from our French-speaking audience to help us finance PeerTube development and test PeerTube on a large scale.

Last march, we released PeerTube in public beta! Medias, collectives, video-makers and even cities… people already made more than a hundred PeerTube instances hosting more than 7500 videos!

You can go and see by yourself the JoinPeertube website, a list of all the existing instances, the software source code… and even watch some videos on Framatube, our PeerTube instance!

…tomorrow, it’ll be great!

Now, PeerTube both needs to come out of its French-speaking shell and lacks key features to become a practical alternative to data-centralizing video platforms. This is where you come in.

Why fund it? To have a real alternative

Let’s learn from the past mistakes… Today’s video-platforms, such as Google’s YouTube, Facebook Videos or Vimeo:

○ Have a non-transparent closed-source code. No one but their NDA-binded employees can go “under the hood” to watch out for non-ethical code;

○ Centralize our data and attention. Their advertisement-based economic model can only be fed by our privacy.

○ Imply huge technical infrastructures. Their centralized video-hosting model can only be sustained by big companies. That’s how they get to impose us their terms and conditions.

PeerTube is already (and legally) all yours!

We are not making our video-platform: we are creating a tool for anyone to make their own! The Free-Libre software licence attached to PeerTube is a legally-biding open contract.  It allows anyone to use, study, adapt and contribute to PeerTube.

PeerTube gives you (or your community) the opportunity to host your own video-tube. You can emancipate yourself from data-centralizing and attention-craving platforms, without becoming another isolated video-website lost on the web.

If you host, you rule: PeerTube Instances hosters can choose their own terms and conditions, moderation management, federations settings (what other PeerTube instances you choose to follow), etc. But remember: with great power comes great responsibilities!

If we have proven that PeerTube works fine, it still needs to grow into its full potential.

Find out more in the campaign page.

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