"this is the dumbest piece of shit"... I've read in a long time!
All the p2p FUD is just that. In TV like Skype the data path is still p2p. only call setup is server based.
That's the case only when the clients are not NAT'ed. When they are, Skype uses supernodes (other clients who are not NAT'ed and have good connections). Other technologies have different names for this, but basically need a 3rd party with public interfaces (e.g. in SIP applications, you often have media relay servers).
I meant "GV" not TV.
The NAT case only applies when both the clients are behind NAT, otherwise you do not need a relay node. Also there seems to be a way to avoid a relay even if both are behind a NAT.
Read the paper, "Autonomous NAT Traversal", joint work with
Christian Grothoff, Nathan S. Evans, and Andreas Müller
published by IEEE at the IEEE P2P'10 Conference (bib, pdf)
http://samy.pl/pwnat/
I've actually read that paper some time ago, but I have not seen any implementation using that technique in the wild. In any case, double NATs are a very common situation, sadly.
