On Oct 12, 2021, at 06:45 , Mark Tinka <mark@tinka.africa> wrote:



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.

It can work this way and usually does if the format of the file being transmitted is an archive (e.g. rar, tar) or compressed file (e.g. gzip) or both (e.g. zip).

OTOH, since MPEG is already a compressed format and little is gained by further attempting to compress it (usually the opposite), it can be sent as a stream. BitTorrent can handle streams and there are clients that will start playback as soon as a sufficient fraction of the early portion of the stream has arrived while continuing to download the remainder of the
file in the background.

Also, BitTorrent isn’t the only form of chunked stream transfer available these days, it’s just the straw man most people use to talk about multiple-source chunked transfer of a common 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.

BitTorrent and a number of other peer-to-peer chunked transfers are already well suited to today’s network architectures and work just fine. The problem is that there’s a bit of history of eyeball ISPs becoming hostile and using things like DPI to find ways to interfere with them when they become “too successful”.

Owen