This needs more visibility! I have watched European conference videos using PeerTube before and the thing works pretty well. Also, great that they're using standardized federation technologies (ActivityPub, same protocols as Mastodon.) All the power to PeerTube for aiming to scale it to the next level.
(disclaimer, I'm a member of the non-profit editing PeerTube)
I can confirm this is not an ad, 'cause we didn't launch the campaign yet :)
It was published without any communication for now, just we had to publish it in advance for calendar reasons (our communication manager going on well deserved holidays, and the person taking over starting only Monday)
So you've cracked a secret that won't be a secret from the beginning of next week.
If you're interested, we can come back to HN as soon as we have launched the campaign to inform you, and answer any questions you may have.
I don't know what bitchute is, never heard of it before.
But peertube is the work of the small french non profit organization and popular education network based on free software framasoft[1].
They are leading the project of de-google-ification of internet[2] by providing free software alternatives to google services and guiding people on how to do it themselves.
The sucess of their initiative lead them to tackle the task of providing an alternative to youtube and that's how peertube came into existence. After successfully funding the first year of development through donations from the french community and showing that peertube works and starts to grow, to be able to continue development towards a 1.0 release they appeal to the global community for funding the project further.[3]
I don't know BitChute enough but the main difference to me seems to be that PeerTube is a community and free-software project where anyone can deploy its own instance, whereas BitChute is closed sourced and centralized in every aspect except video streaming.
For what it's worth, I made a contribution!