Peertube is the opposite of centralized video hosting; it's a federation of nodes.
A video hosting company needs to hold all the videos hostage so they can make money somehow, like via ads. Plus the ability to control content: the videos themselves (e.g. be able to censor or delete them), and other content like user accounts, comments and whatnot.
This is like asking, why doesn't Reddit just operate as a Usenet gateway with a Web UI?
While you're correct that in this way a CDN is similar to peer-federated systems, this is also a low-effort trite response that misses about 70% of the differences between the two.
The main difference being, of course, CDNs provide a delivery and storage service which you pay for, meaning the content remains yours, the circumstances under which it is viewed is under your control, and you're simply paying for them to deliver it for you. With peer-based systems, those two key points are no longer true.
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Peertube is the opposite of centralized video hosting; it's a federation of nodes.
A video hosting company needs to hold all the videos hostage so they can make money somehow, like via ads. Plus the ability to control content: the videos themselves (e.g. be able to censor or delete them), and other content like user accounts, comments and whatnot.
This is like asking, why doesn't Reddit just operate as a Usenet gateway with a Web UI?
Like a CDN? :)
While you're correct that in this way a CDN is similar to peer-federated systems, this is also a low-effort trite response that misses about 70% of the differences between the two.
The main difference being, of course, CDNs provide a delivery and storage service which you pay for, meaning the content remains yours, the circumstances under which it is viewed is under your control, and you're simply paying for them to deliver it for you. With peer-based systems, those two key points are no longer true.
The short answer is that geographical resource balancing isn't federation, even though both involve multiple hosts.
Geogprahical distribution is irrelevant if there is only a single gateway to the content.
Then the benefits of distribution are largely only realized by the owner.