i guess but im thinking like multicast with the people sharing like bittorrent, just live. so you'd need to factor in people leaving and people leeching
So a multicast like derivative that is peer aware and can redistribute locally any available parts - which would require some sort of caching, which would probably break copyright etc... So perhaps that's the reason why nothing exists. \o/
looks interesting! surprised something like that never caught on. I looking for something like Twitch basically. It has really good quality and is live. But obviously Twitch is just losing money and using all Amazons resources so I wanted to see if there's a more sustainable p2p approach
I just meant like never caught on as in like it's not super popular, but looks like it's on the come up. would be nice to have a real youtube competitor lol
Yes. It's the typical 'hen & egg' problem. I'm watching there from time to time, and even found some things (independent trance/ambient/goa music) which didn't exist on YT at all! Though the selection is limited, compared to YT or whatever, it's less algorithmic, and because of this you're not forced to use most exaggerated grimacing or clickbaity titles, IF you have no commercial interests and give a shit about ads.
If that's your thing. And you have some sort of presence online elsewhere, then you can link to peertube, no matter which, or selfhosted, without problem.
That's why I pointed you to it. If you need/want the most massive audience, because of platform familarity/network effect, then probably not. At least not now. But someone has to start somehow :)
For massive video distribution, getting acquired by a company with "infinite bandwidth" is the sustainable approach.
Orchestrating p2p realtime video distribution is going to have a lot of problems, and spend VC money until someone acquires you is just a lot easier.
Here's a small list of challenges you'd face:
You'll need to have a pretty good distribution network to handle users who just can't manage to p2p connect.
Figuring out the right amount of user's bandwidth you can use without people getting upset; there's a lot of internet accounts with bandwidth quotas, especially for mobile
Trying to arrange so that users connect to users with the least transmission delays would be needed to reduce overall latency. Between cross oceanic connections having unavoidable latency, the potential of buffer bloat, and having a reasonable jitter buffer, pretty soon you have wild delays and potential rebuffering.
Bandwidth constraints / layer switching is going to be a big challenge; it's one thing when your server can just push the best stream the client can manage, but if you're streaming from a peer and the stream is too big, the peer probably doesn't have a smaller stream to switch to and there's no good way to know if where the bandwidth constraint is ... maybe you should switch to the same stream from someone else or maybe you should switch to a smaller stream. Can you get even packets from one peer and odd packets from another ... should you?
what about having something reasonable for lag, like 30-60 seconds would that make a big difference or you think it would just eventually degrade too?
Also do you think there's any way you can prioritize seeders in such a protocol? like some kind of algorithm that the more you share the more you're prioritized in getting the most up to date packets.
The main reason I would think it would be useful is 1. since streaming sites seem to lose a lot of money and 2. sports streams are really bad, even paid ones. I have dazn and two other sports streaming services and they still lag and are only 720p
> what about having something reasonable for lag, like 30-60 seconds would that make a big difference or you think it would just eventually degrade too?
I think you would probably need something more in the neighbourhood of 10 minutes to really make a difference. If you could make a stable p2p live streaming app with the number of peers all watching the same stream in the hundreds and only 30 seconds latency, i'd consider that pretty amazing.
> Also do you think there's any way you can prioritize seeders in such a protocol? like some kind of algorithm that the more you share the more you're prioritized in getting the most up to date packets.
If we are talking about a livestream (and not "netflix" type streaming) then i don't think seeders are a thing. You can't seed a file that isn't finished being created yet.
If you mean more generally punishing free-riders, i think that is difficult in a live stream as generally data would be coming in from a different set of peers than the peers you are sending data out to, so its difficult (maybe not impossible) to know who is misbehaving.
