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Ask HN: Why is there no P2P streaming protocol like BitTorrent?

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Re: Ask HN: Why is there no P2P streaming protocol like BitTorrent?

#141

Post by imtringued »

martinald wrote: post #128

The real reason is that bandwidth is dirt cheap, if you know what are you are doing at scale. For 'hobbyists' there is a lot of complexity with setting up your own streaming infrastructure compared to just using YouTube or Twitch. Then for media companies who want to own it, they can just buy their own infra and networking which is outrageously cheap. HE.net advertises 40gbit/sec of transit for $2200/month. I'm overs…

This is basically the answer.

Minimum latency broadcast forms a B tree. A tree is by definition not peer to peer. The number of branches per node is upload speed divided by bandwidth of the stream. This branching factor is extremely low for residential internet with asymmetric high download and low upload speeds.

Once you add malicious adversaries in the P2P network or poor network connectivity, each client will need to read multiple streams via erasure encoding at once and switch over, when a node loses its connection.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no P2P streaming protocol like BitTorrent?

#144

Post by whalesalad »

miohtama wrote: post #20

There was Joost in 2008, from Skype founders. Skype was originally P2P until Microsoft acquisition and killing this legally questionable feature - need to feed the big brother (: Joost raised ~$50M. I remember it as it was one of rare apps built in XUL, the same framework as Mozilla apps (Firefox). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joost

I distinctly remember living alone in my first apartment and trying to use Joost like a TV. It was a dismal experience.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no P2P streaming protocol like BitTorrent?

#145

Post by rollcat »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #142

It's been tried a few times. The bottleneck still exists in the last mile of the network. Users simply don't have good enough equipment to reliably handle this amount of streaming data.

Yep, real-world HLS/DASH solutions rely heavily on edge caches; you don't care as much about having your infra in the right region, but POPs are everything.

Netflix famously offers ISPs an appliance.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no P2P streaming protocol like BitTorrent?

#146

Post by slashink »

jeroenhd wrote: post #93
slashink wrote: post #45

Latency.

Twitch streamers seem to be fine with the 10-60 second latency Twitch adds, depending on how bad their network is performing. Requirements will differ per industry but I don't think latency is a killer necessarily.

Twitch does not add 10-60 seconds of latency. The average latency with default OBS settings is 3-6 seconds.

Source: I worked on the Twitch video system for 6 years.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no P2P streaming protocol like BitTorrent?

#147

Post by garganzol »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #106

For a while, I was CTO of a company called Livestation [0], which as the Wikipedia article states, was "originally based on peer-to-peer technology acquired from Microsoft Research". This P2P stack was meant to allow for mass scaling of lowish latency video streaming, even in parts of the World with limited peer bandwidth to original content source servers. The VC-1 format got into a legal quagmire, as most video str…

I used LiveStation from time to time, and just for fun I was playing around with finding out when and how it employed P2P protocols. Needless to say, I never found any evidence of P2P in LiveStation. And now I know why :)

Thank you for bringing up the warm memories I thought I no longer had.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no P2P streaming protocol like BitTorrent?

#148

Post by zinekeller »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #142

It's been tried a few times. The bottleneck still exists in the last mile of the network. Users simply don't have good enough equipment to reliably handle this amount of streaming data.

One of the problems is that even "symmetric" connections are usually not symmetric at all (obviously talking about residential connections here, not DIA).

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no P2P streaming protocol like BitTorrent?

#150

Post by andruby »

Splitcast Technology built this in 2012. The company folded (couldn't find revenue, and had founder struggles ) but as far as I remember the tech worked. It still needed a lot of seeding nodes, but a significant chunk of the bandwidth was provided by the "viewer peers".

Key part of that tech was that it synchronized the playback between all peers. That was nice for stock market announcements and sport events for example.

https://web.archive.org/web/20131208173255/http://splitcast....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5UYu9jeQbY

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/splitcast-technology

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