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

It is a thing.

For livestreams there's AceStream built on BitTorrent, but I think it's closed-source. They do have some SDK but I never looked into it. It's mostly used by IPTV pirates. I've used it a few times and it's hit-or-miss but when it works well I have been able to watch livestreams in HD/FullHD without cuts. Latency is always very bad though.

Then for video-on-demand there are some web-based ones like PeerTube (FOSS) and I think BitChute? Sadly webtorrent is very limited.

> degrades their control over the content

Encryption (can work with sharing), signatures, fall back to CDN. Control is not an issue.

> torrents are good enough.

Torrents can't do the massive market of livestream, like sports or season finales or reality TV / news. This is the entire point of the question.

> The only entities

And everyone kicked off of YouTube or doesn't want to use big corporations on principal, like Hacker Cons or the open source community.

There are streaming sites on the high-seas that use webtorrent. Interestingly (at least for me), this bypasses firewall based IPS/inspection that looks for bittorrent because it's all https. People use it to stream movies at work lol. Good for them I guess.

A lot of comments mention it has been a thing in various forms through the internet’s brief history. The interesting question is why didn’t it take off—especially when the technology was there.

One possibility as you allude to is licensing. In a P2P streaming model “rights” holders want to collect royalties on content distribution. I’m not sure of a way you could make this feel legal short of abolishing copyright, but if you could build a way to fairly collect royalties, I wonder if you’d make inroads with enforcers. But overall that problem seems to have been solved with ads and subscription fees.

Another data point is that the behemoths decided to serve content digitally. Netflix and Spotify showed up. The reason the general population torrented music is because other than a CD changer, having a digital library was a requirement in order to listen to big playlists of songs on your… Zune. Or iPod. That problem doesn't exist anymore and so the demand dried up. There was also an audiophile scene but afaik with Apple Lossless the demand there has diminished too.

And finally, since people were solving the problem for real, we also entertained big deal solutions to reduce the strain on the network. If you stream P2P your packets take the slow lane. Netflix and other content providers build out hardware colocated with last mile ISPs so that content distribution can happen even more efficiently than in a P2P model.

In short: steaming turned into a real “industry”. Innovators and capitalists threw lots of time and money at the problem. Streaming platforms emerged, for better and for worse. And here we are today, on the cusp of repeating the past because short sighted business mongers have balkanized access with exclusive content libraries for the user numbers.

I worked for a company called Streamroot which sold exactly this, and I can tell your first paragraph is indeed correct but the second isn't: we had major streaming platforms as customers when I was there (not global giants like Netflix or YouTube, but big european players like Canal+ or Eurosport) and we also had plenty of warez websites (streaming sport, animes, porn, etc.).

I then left and the company later got acquired by Level 3 so I don't know exactly how it evolved but it's likely that they abandoned the illegal streaming market for reputational reasons and stuck with big players.