So my party is in the base of the main villain. They have a video of the villain killing the wife of a high-up politician, and intend to upload the video to the holonet if the villain or one of his goons fires upon them. My question is, does the holonet work like that? Would they just be able to instantly upload a file without any upload time? Does the holonet even have a YouTube-like service that one could upload something to? Could the villains kill them and then just delete the video using the data Pad? I can't find any information on the holonet, and I don't want to just make up rules that would hurt the players, but I also don't want to be unrealistic.

When they say "Upload the video" what they are actually threatening to do is make the information publicly available. Why does that threaten the villain? Does the villain have a public facade of a good guy. Or is it just that the politician is unaware of who to blame for his wife's death? If it is the former then they could achieve the result by sending the holo-vid (call it a holo-vid, that sounds more Star Wars) to a local news outlet. If it is the latter they can just send it to the politician directly.

But to answer your question specifically, no I have never seen any suggestion of a youtube like service on the holonet.

Have you ever seen "Serenity" or "V for Vendetta". The news and video feeds are heavily controlled by the Empire. The PCs will probably need to seek out someone who can broadcast pirate feeds through the holonet.

They will need to find their own "Mr. Universe"

How are they going to connect to the holonet if they're in the villain's base? And since they stated their plan, why wouldn't he just jam coms and prevent connections to the holonet? And if they get fired on and upload the video, why would he bother to order his goons to stop shooting?

Desperate Allies has a pirated holonet array to hijack holonet channels for doing things just like this. Think of it less like youtube and more like broadcast television. You hijack the carrier wave for the Imperial News Network (INN) and then play the video. Everywhere that is downstream of this access point, before it gets isolated from the rest of the holonet, will be able to watch what is being shown. So, that might mean not a lot of people get to see it, unless this base is the main source of holonet propagation for the area. What you would probably have to do is escape with the holo-vid, then get to some kind of massive broadcasting array, official or not, and broadcast the video from there. While Imperial broadcast centers would be able to shut down their stations, a larger, say, sector broadcast center would reach a lot more places. Some of the video would be seen before the feed was cut, everywhere it reached.

So my party is in the base of the main villain. They have a video of the villain killing the wife of a high-up politician, and intend to upload the video to the holonet if the villain or one of his goons fires upon them. My question is, does the holonet work like that? Would they just be able to instantly upload a file without any upload time? Does the holonet even have a YouTube-like service that one could upload something to? Could the villains kill them and then just delete the video using the data Pad? I can't find any information on the holonet, and I don't want to just make up rules that would hurt the players, but I also don't want to be unrealistic.

Much appreciate the question. This is SO MUCH of a google-youtube effect that bleeds into the RPG. They don't have all of this uploading to the web from handheld devices on a whim. This is much easier to convey if people in the group are old enough to have been around when such things weren't possible. But with younger people, from their viewpoint, they would think, "Why wouldn't it be possible?" In such a case, yeah, it might seem like you are being unnecessarily harsh by denying them that.

It seems that uploading and broadcasting requires quite an effort and use of equipment. From wookiepedia, the Empire and Republic gov't broadcasted stuff. In real life, just about anybody can broadcast anything on the internet and even public channel TV. It might be an easier hurdle to have uploading capabilities to be significantly more difficult since that seems to match info on it. And that might be easier to swallow for those who are used to the free-flow access that we have today. In an older movie, The Running Man, the good guys needed the access codes to transmit over the network. No codes = no broadcast.

The crew of the Ghost had to break into an imperial communications tower just to plant a spike and broadcast a message. Though, in fairness that was to make sure that the message was heard.

Thank you all so much for the responses. I have, perhaps against my better judgment, decided upon simply letting them be able to instantly upload the file to some kind of youtube-like website. Not because I think this is the most realistic option--far from it--but because they have been under the impression all along that this is how it works, and changing it on them now when they are about to get killed if I changed the rules would probably be unfair. Some of the players in the group can get easily angry, and this sort of thing might put them over the top. But in the future, I will make the holonet work more like what you all have suggested, since it seems more realistic. Again, thanks for the answers.

They will need to find their own "Mr. Universe"

"I'm just here to paahmp you ahp!"

Yep, holonet is a communication medium, not a database. It's not the internet.