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Posted by memet_rush 4/14/2025

Ask HN: Why is there no P2P streaming protocol like BitTorrent?

I've been wondering if anyone knows why there is no P2P protocol for mass live stream content in decent quality? specifically what are the technical limitations or is it mostly that people don't want to get destroyed by media company lawyers? I've searched around for a while and i cant find anything like that that can handle thousands of people streaming. The closest is probably Webrtc and that looks like it can only handle 500~ peers.

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!

236 points | 223 commentspage 6
gunalx 4/15/2025|
You could utilize webtorrents, with a master seed, to in theory get really high scaling of content download, as one would scale peers at the same time of leetchers. Add a cordination server on top to sync timings and you should be there.
GTP 4/15/2025||
A related thing: wasn't PopcornTime using bittorent to stream movies? Did it have any notable difference from Bittorent or any notable issue/drawback? I never used it, but it sounded like a big thing at the time.
teddyh 4/15/2025||
This has been invented many times, but every time someone invents an actually effective method of person-to-person file transfer, it gets used for piracy and blocked and shunned.
globular-toast 4/15/2025||
It's easier to control people with a centralised architecture.
pabs3 4/15/2025||
Bittorrent already works fine for streaming:

https://github.com/johang/vlc-bittorrent/

oldgregg 4/14/2025||
Build it. Use Go. Maybe nknorg/nnet for P2P. Signed HLS segments. Have Go also serve the web front-end with a WASM web worker. Public nodes can run on a very lightweight VPS/server with an autocert domain. Viewers browser join the swarm with WASM-- this way people can just type in a web address so it's very user friendly but the domain doesn't actually have to serve any data. I would just use a trusted pubkey to sign P2P updates so nodes can block naughty IP addresses. Should get you very friendly user experience, easy node deployment, pretty low latency, and bittorrent level of legal resilience.
dboreham 4/15/2025||
For the same reason that BitTorrent doesn't work: providing a service costs money, and when there's no way to collect money then you get no service.
immibis 4/14/2025||
What does PeerTube do?
zveyaeyv3sfye 4/16/2025||
> I've been wondering if anyone knows why there is no P2P protocol for mass live stream content in decent quality?

We had torrent client/streaming video players maybe 20 years ago already.

> Does anyone have knowledge on why it isn't a thing still though?

It is a thing, it seems you didn't do your research.

There's articles all over the interweb if you went and looked, such as

https://www.makeuseof.com/best-torrent-streaming-apps/

remram 4/16/2025|
Seems you missed the "live" part.
behringer 4/15/2025|
You can stream over bittorrent... I do it all the time, you start your download, set it to download in order, and then just start watching it.
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