Posted by memet_rush 4/14/2025
Ask HN: Why is there no P2P streaming protocol like BitTorrent?
I was thinking most people nowaday have at least 30mbps upload and a 1080p stream only needs ~10mbps and 720p needs ~5ish. Also i think it wouldnt have to be live, people would definitely not mind some amount of lag. I was thinking the big O for packets propagating out in the network should be Log(N) since if a master is sharing the content then is connected to 10 slaves, then those connected to 10 other slaves and so on.
The other limitation I could think of is prioritizing who gets the packets first since there's a lot of people with 1gbs connections or >10mbps connections. Also deprioritizing leechers to keep it from degrading the stream.
Does anyone have knowledge on why it isn't a thing still though? it's super easy to find streams on websites but they're all 360p or barely load. I saw the original creator of bittorrent was creating something like this over 10 years ago and seems to be a dead project. Also this is ignoring the huge time commitment it would take to program something like this. I want to know if this is technically possible to have streams of lets say 100,000 people and why or why not.
Just some thoughts, thanks in advance!
But the reality is for 99% of people Youtube and Twitch work just fine.
Plus most residential ISPs have really poor upload speed, and very restrictive data caps.
https://www.bittorrent.com/blog/2016/05/17/bittorrent-live-m...
Tailscale (or any other P2P overlay network) could solve this problem by re-enabling the multicast support that most ISPs block. It's not a terrible idea.
Edit: a comment elsewhere linked https://www.librecast.net/librecast.html which seems to be doing exactly this.
torrent PROTOCOL does not require to download random pieces, in random order.
ONLY bittorrent, inc. COMPANY which releases "Utorrent" and "Bittorent" NAMED APPLICATIONS/PROGRAMS does not want legal trouble from media/music companies. Because STREAMING is other legal category then downloading. There is no other reason for torrent PROTOCOL to not deliver file pieces in sequential order.
if you need instant nanosecond delayed stream, those does not exist anywhere, even radio, tv stations over the air are delayed so they all transmit synchronized. so 0 latency and synchronized can be mistaken for each other.
> if you need instant nanosecond delayed stream
I believe nobody was suggesting that.
"super seeding" is a different feature where a seed won't upload more pieces to a peer unless a previously uploaded piece has been distributed to another peer first.
it is ONLY important when you need to not have people (SWARM) finishing downloading of torrent then closing torrent client app and not sending data chunks to next person.
BUT everyone is saying it is stream and has to be instant showing of picture/video.
so i do not understand why all those people in other comments are caring about state of swarm if we do have thousands people watching and everybody is saying there are big amounts of people watching but still caring about swarm..
(swarm thing is important with normal use case of BitTorrent, irrelevant for streaming)
i understand what they are saying, they do not understand that they are saying nonsense.
> 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.
Off-topic but I'm impressed with how many potentially revolutionary projects get funding from NLNet.
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.