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Comment by colinbartlett | Hacker News Reader

Others have reported Netflix blocking IP ranges owned by cloud hosting companies. So this solution might not work. What if it was a peer-to-peer service? Whereby the ultimate exit point was the home internet connection of another subscriber?

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Such a service already exists, it's called Hola[¹]. The problem is that the owners of machines serving as exit nodes are exposing themselves to liability that a regular VPN or VPS service would probably be protected against, and often without even realizing it.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hola_(VPN)

Hola doesn't route users through other users, it uses proxy servers. Users are turned into exit nodes for Luminati.io customers (servers/bots) only.

Ha ha. Why to avoid Hola ;)

I think most people's asymmetric bandwidth rates would get in the way of a p2p solution being usable.

Maybe if there were some way to break the stream up into individual media files, and then you could download one identical file from lots of different users at the same time.

BitTorrent?

BitTorrent works because uploaders only ever upload a small piece of the file. This works well for downloads but not at all for streaming.

Multipath TCP exists:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multipath_TCP

but that requires the cooperation of Netflix, naturally.

In the case of Netflix, the video content doesn't need to go through a proxy; only the website does (at the moment). So bandwidth shouldn't really be an issue.

EC2 is blocked

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