So downloading a video as a torrent will reduce the load on the peertueb instance?
Peertube
A free software to take back control of your videos
Peertube is an open, federated alternative to Youtube without advertising or tracking. On this site, you can find a good Peertube instance, with good rules, good moderation and most importantly a friendly community.
At first it will increase it until you have the data ;)
A major limitation I've always noticed is you have to keep the window open to seed it, who's realistically going to do that for any reasonable amount of time?
It's not supposed to work like that. Imagine a video gets 2 views. Both viewers can mostly get the vid from the server without much being shared. If there ever should be 100s of people watching a video simultaneously, in the time one of them watches the video a typical internet connection can upload the video 1-10 times. That's a huge weight lifted off from the server if many people upload a bunch. So with peertube I guess servers can scale better than they should be able to with their upload bandwidth.
What I am trying to say is that the sharing only works if there is a sufficient amount of other people wanting to watch the video at this time. That's where the magic should happen.
I guess it would be cool if someone with a large peertube server did have stats which show performance and how much people shared between each other! Does something like this exist?