An Update on the Use of Private and Unlisted Videos on Our PeerTube Instance
We wanted to share an update with you all about the use of private and unlisted videos on our platform.
We're coming up on six months since we first launched the instance. It's been far more successful popular than I could ever imagine. We have (as of the time of writing) 94 members and 181 videos utilising over 500GB of our on-premises data storage.
The spirit of this platform is to provide open, inclusive space to share video content, whether that be video, tech, personal stuff and anything and everything in between.
Unfortunately, we have seen a number of accounts being created for seemingly the sole purpose of hosting private videos for business purposes. This is not in the spirit of this platform, and we will be amending our terms of service around the fair use of private and unlisted videos.
I want to clarify that it is not the purpose of this policy to restrict the use of private and unlisted videos for channels that legitimately exist within and interact with the community at large. It is to prevent the use of our precious, finite resources on accounts that make no contribution to the community at all.
What Can You Do Under the Fair Use Policy?
Under the policy, you will be able to do the following:
- Share small pieces of private content to a very small audience. Bear in mind that the moderation team has full access to all videos on the platform, including private and unlisted videos.
- Provide “early access” to public videos for your paid subscribers on another platform (provided they become public a later date).
- Where the majority of your content is public, provide limited private or unlisted content for any other reason.
What Can't You Do Under the Fair Use Policy?
Under the policy, you will not be able to do the following:
- Upload large volumes of private and/or unlisted videos without any public content on a channel, or where public content makes up a small minority of your overall content volumes.
- Upload any private and/or unlisted content that is contravention of any of our terms.
In Summary
As I've said above, I don't intend to unreasonably restrict anyone's usage on this platform – it is simply about making sure the finest resources we have at our disposal are used to provide content that everyone can enjoy and access.
If you're an account that is at risk of falling foul of this policy we will contact you directly. If not, there's no need to worry.
There is any opportunity that expanded access may be able to be made available to regular financial supporters of our services, as the financial contributions allow us to expand our processing and storage capabilities. If you're interested in this please reach out, but what this would look like hasn't been fully considered as of the writing of this.