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…
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no P2P streaming protocol like BitTorrent?
#231A bit like peer to peer warehousing to build an Amazon? huge logistics operation vs. a million people in their Prius driving to their neighbours.