On 10/11/21 22:57, Matthew Walster wrote:

Ignoring for the moment that P2P is inherently difficult to stream with (you're usually downloading chunks in parallel, and with devices like Smart TVs etc you don't really have the storage to do so anyway) there's also the problem that things like BitTorrent don't know network topology and therefore only really increases the cross-sectional bandwidth required.

Not to mention that it has been tried before, and didn't work then either.

Yeah, and people also want to click a title and start watching immediately.

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but the way I know BitTorrent to work is the file is downloaded to disk, unarchived and then listed as ready to watch. It also assumes the device has all the necessary apps and codecs needed to render the file.

On the other hand, BitTorrent could just make an Apple TV/PS4/PS5/Xbox/whatever-device-you-use app as well. But I doubt that will work, unless someone can think up a clever way to modify BitTorrent to suit today's network architectures.

Mark.