Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 231 posts

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

#53

Post by protocolture »

dp-hackernews wrote: post #3

Isn't that what multicast is for?

I had a teacher in uni who was fairly convinced that some kind of intelligent multicast was the solution here.

But after working in ISP for a while I realised that the issue is getting ISP's to use cool protocols is just impossible and everything must be built at higher levels.

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

#54

Post by notpushkin »

aaron695 wrote: post #44
reliablereason wrote: post #16

The only entities that could use such a thing are major streaming platforms, and projects trying to stream copyrighted content without consent. The former don't want to use it as it degrades their control over the content, and the later don't want to make a new system cause systems that are built on torrents are good enough.

> 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…

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

And of course if an encryption key gets leaked, you can just rotate it. Since it’s a stream, past content is not as important.

(That said, I don’t think it will help — any DRM can be cracked, and there’s plenty of online TV streaming sites even with the current centralized systems.)

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

#56

Post by rapnie »

wmf wrote: post #14
dp-hackernews wrote: post #3

Isn't that what multicast is for?

Multicast doesn't work on the Internet.

You might have a look at Librecast [0] which is a R&D project funded by Horizons Europe NGI0 programme via NLnet, aiming to the bring multicast to the current unicast internet and smoothen the transition of projects that adopt it. A great intro to multicast and Librecast is given in Brett Sheffield's 2020 LinuxConfAU talk "Privacy and Decentralization with Multicast" that is available on Peertube [1].

> To enable multicast on the unicast Internet we start by building an encrypted overlay network using point-to-point links between participating nodes. Once established, our overlay network can run whatever protocols we require, unimpeded by routers and middleboxes and which is resistant to interception, interference and netblocks.

[0] https://www.librecast.net/librecast-strategy-2025.html

[1] https://spectra.video/w/9cBGzMceGAjVfw4eFV78D2

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

#57

Post by Tepix »

greenavocado wrote: post #38

The only way this will be possible is if there is widespread adoption of an Internet overlay network similar to Tailscale in its design. Fortunately or unfortunately depending on how you look at it Tailscale is limited to Layer 3 so Multicast doesn't work (it depends on IGMP to function correctly).

Why do you think so?

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

#58

Post by globular-toast »

greenavocado wrote: post #38

The only way this will be possible is if there is widespread adoption of an Internet overlay network similar to Tailscale in its design. Fortunately or unfortunately depending on how you look at it Tailscale is limited to Layer 3 so Multicast doesn't work (it depends on IGMP to function correctly).

Why Tailscale? Are you aware of IPv6?
Post reply on HN