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!
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If you have [say] a 640 MB recording at 120 fps you would only need to successfully receive 2.5 MB at 30 fps to be able to watch the entire thing. With a slight delay in playback you could even hop from one sub set of channels to another.
It should work offline too. One could have the cutting edge crispy resolution on a large display or watch the same on a crappy old laptop. (and everything in between)
For fun I one time convert a 3.5 hour lecture to 75 MB and was stunned by how watchable it still was.
You'd need to make a UI for it
Source: I worked on the Twitch video system for 6 years.