| ▲ | PaulRobinson 5 days ago | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
For a while, I was CTO of a company called Livestation [0], which as the Wikipedia article states, was "originally based on peer-to-peer technology acquired from Microsoft Research". This P2P stack was meant to allow for mass scaling of lowish latency video streaming, even in parts of the World with limited peer bandwidth to original content source servers. The VC-1 format got into a legal quagmire, as most video streaming protocols do, and it speaks volumes that by the time I turned up in ~2012-ish, the entire stack was RTMP, RTSP, HDS and HLS with zero evidence of that P2P tech stack in production. My main role was to get the ingest stack out of a DC and into cloud, while also dealing with a myriad of poor design decisions that led to issues (yes, that 2013 outage in the first paragraph of the wiki article was on my watch). At no point did anybody suggest to me that what we really needed to fix our attention back to was P2P streaming, beyond the fact the company built a version of Periscope (Twitter's first live streaming product), and launched it weeks/months before they did, and were pivoting towards a social media platform, at which point I decided to go do other things. The technical and legal problems are real, and covered elsewhere here. People want reliable delivery. Even Spotify, YouTube and others who have licensed content and could save a pile by moving to DRM-ified P2P don't go near it, and that should tell you something about the challenges. I'd love more widespread adoption of P2P tech, but not convinced we'll ever see it in AV any time soon, unfortunately. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | garganzol 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I used LiveStation from time to time, and just for fun I was playing around with finding out when and how it employed P2P protocols. Needless to say, I never found any evidence of P2P in LiveStation. And now I know why :) Thank you for bringing up the warm memories I thought I no longer had. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | apitman 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
You bring up a good point. It's interesting that YouTube at least doesn't do p2p for their non-DRM content. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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