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

Posted by memet_rush 6 days ago

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!

234 points | 222 commentspage 9

shemulray667 3 days ago|

[dead]

Szpadel 6 days ago|

I would see that easiest way to bring something like that would be some adaptation of m4u format, just instead of URLs to video it could have URL to torrent/magnet.

one issue I can imagine would be that each part would discover peers independently where assumption that most peers of previous parts should be expected to also have those files.

second idea would be to use ipfs in that way instead of torrent. that would probably have much easier time for reusing peer discovery between parts and also would solve issue when to stop seeding as this is already build in into protocol.

I guess that creating distributed twitch basing on ipfs would be feasible but not sure how many people would like to install ipfs node before that could use that. that's kind of chicken and egg problem, you need a lot of people before this system starts work really well, but to get interest it need to really perform well so people would migrate from twitch like services.

ofc you can use public gateways. afaik cloudflare have public ipfs endpoint that could serve as fallback

immibis 6 days ago|

I would think that the easiest way would be to not use torrents, because torrents have fixed top-level hashes. Instead, create a new protocol like bittorrent but streaming.