PeerTube in de praktijk: een interview met Beeld & Geluid
PublicSpaces, 21 November 2024
Mediamuseum Beeld & Geluid is a PeerTube forerunner. We interviewed our coalition partner about the video platform.
For three years now, Mediamuseum Beeld & Geluid has been publishing videos on PeerTube and there is now an enormous archive of video material to be found there. As a coalition partner of PublicSpaces, the museum is part of the recently started PeerTube Spaces project in which we set up and test PeerTube servers with pilot partners. Beeld & Geluid is an important source of knowledge in this; knowledge that Frank Sträter, ICT engineer at Beeld & Geluid, is already willing to share with us in an interview.
Hey Frank. When and how did you switch to PeerTube?
As an audiovisual archive, we were interested in PeerTube early on from the PublicSpaces initiative. Around the launch of PeerTube 1.0 at the end of 2018, we started investigating whether PeerTube could be useful as a publicly accessible platform for open content.
Since 2021, we have gone live with our PeerTube instance as a showcase of our project ‘Extending PeerTube’. This project aimed to extend PeerTube to support the availability, accessibility and findability of large-scale public media collections.
By importing the content (video + metadata) from the existing platform openbeelden.nl, we launched our PeerTube platform with more than 7000 videos.
You are truly a pioneer. Why the brave choice for the not so well-known PeerTube?
At Beeld & Geluid we have set up our own video hosting websites in the past, but they were quite expensive to maintain and modernize where necessary over the years. We saw potential in PeerTube to serve as a basis for future similar use.
In our opinion, the decentralized federation model of PeerTube (and other ActivityPub platforms such as Mastodon) also ties in with the mission of the Netwerk Digitaal Erfgoed (NDE), which facilitates and stimulates knowledge sharing and collaboration in the cultural sector.
What kind of videos do you put on PeerTube?
Beeld & Geluid does not make many videos itself and is mainly the caretaker of digitized audiovisual material in our archive. We only put videos on PeerTube that are royalty-free and that we are allowed to republish.
What is the purpose of the Beeld & Geluid videos on PeerTube? Is it a way of archiving or are there more goals behind it? For example, do you want to reach an audience or make the material easier to share?
In general, the goal is to show the public what is stored in our archive. Making it available online gives the public an accessible way to get to know our archive. With the material on PeerTube, we also reach a wider audience and stimulate creative reuse.
This reuse has to do with the creative commons license under which the videos are placed. What does that entail and why did you choose it?
Creative Commons (CC) is an originally American project for promoting open content. Its goal is to make creative works more freely available than is possible with traditional copyright, for example so that these works can be copied and distributed more easily or that others can continue to work on them. Creative Commons offers various free licenses that copyright holders can use to prevent problems that can arise due to current copyright legislation when distributing information.
For us, the Creative Commons licenses or the Public Domain marking are the only way to republish material from our archive free of restrictions for the general public.
How do you like the moderation on your server? Do you have a lot of work to do?
Moderation with PeerTube involves 2 things. Firstly, the moderation of video content and therefore assessing whether the videos that are uploaded meet the conditions of use of the platform and thus responding if a user objects to published videos. In addition, we have moderation of video comments: assessing comments on videos that can be posted by viewers.
On our server, we do not have an open sign-up and our users who upload videos adhere to the agreements about what is allowed in terms of content. In the beginning, we chose not to allow comments because we were concerned that it would be too much work. PeerTube has now been further developed as a platform and it is a lot easier to limit moderation work (comment spam was a problem for a long time).
Due to the mainly historical nature of our videos, we do not think we will get many comments, so it might be a good idea to turn it on for all videos. In any case, we do not expect a lot of work.
You host your PeerTube server yourself. How much time did you spend setting up the server and how much time do you spend on it now? What kind of tasks are involved?
Setting up a server is not that difficult and can be done in one day. Most of the time is spent on configuration and especially adding content. In the beginning, we were still actively improving PeerTube itself (bug fixing, testing, documentation), but PeerTube is now so stable and feature complete that we spend little time on it. The only task that remains is installing an update when there is a new release. The costs (time and money) are therefore currently zero.
With PeerTube you can federate content between your own server and that of others. How does B&G deal with this? What have you learned from this?
Federating with another server works best if you have thematically the same content and each other’s videos do not look out of place. From the beginning and due to the lack of other (mainly Dutch-language) instances with historical footage, we have mainly federated to other instances, so one-way traffic, in which our videos could be seen on other instances, but which themselves hardly contained any interesting videos. We no longer do that, because the context of our videos (mainly Dutch-language historical footage) was missing on other institutions.
You use different video platforms. YouTube, your own platform related to DAAN (Digital Audiovisual Archive of the Netherlands), PeerTube. How do these relate to each other? When is which platform chosen?
DAAN is our primary platform for our entire archive and is mainly intended for ordering AV material, but is not royalty-free and is intended for media professionals and individuals who purchase a license for use. YouTube is more comparable to PeerTube, but mainly for playing content and serves more to promote our collection. You will also find fragments of videos compiled by the web editors. PeerTube makes it possible to legally download and reuse an integral copy (mp4) in addition to playing it under the condition of the Creative Commons license.
What are the pitfalls in setting up and using PeerTube?
Don’t expect too much from the reach of your organization as a website. The public does not come to your “website” to watch videos for an evening. The number of views of a video is mainly of qualitative value (low number, high interest) and the appreciation will not be expressed often (likes, comments, etc.). Bring the videos themselves to your audience by embedding them in an article or sharing them via social media, especially if you are already present as an organization on Mastodon. You only need a few people who believe in the future of PeerTube and enjoy investing time and effort in it and have a mandate from your organization to make it your own success.
Would you recommend PeerTube to other organizations?
Yes, we would definitely recommend trying it once; even if you only have a few videos or you already have all your videos on YouTube. It has become so easy to start a channel on an open instance or run a temporary hosted PeerTube for low costs. You can even import your entire YouTube channel without any technical knowledge and have both exist synchronously for a while.
PeerTube has developed very quickly and has become more stable and versatile at a rapid pace. Depending on what kind of audiovisual material you have to offer, there are also other alternatives emerging within the “Fediverse” (ActivityPub based platforms), such as Loops as an alternative to TikTok.