> what about having something reasonable for lag, like 30-60 seconds would that make a big difference or you think it would just eventually degrade too?

I think you would probably need something more in the neighbourhood of 10 minutes to really make a difference. If you could make a stable p2p live streaming app with the number of peers all watching the same stream in the hundreds and only 30 seconds latency, i'd consider that pretty amazing.

> Also do you think there's any way you can prioritize seeders in such a protocol? like some kind of algorithm that the more you share the more you're prioritized in getting the most up to date packets.

If we are talking about a livestream (and not "netflix" type streaming) then i don't think seeders are a thing. You can't seed a file that isn't finished being created yet.

If you mean more generally punishing free-riders, i think that is difficult in a live stream as generally data would be coming in from a different set of peers than the peers you are sending data out to, so its difficult (maybe not impossible) to know who is misbehaving.

Apparently PeerTube can do 10s delay to hundreds (not thousands) of viewers.