Not really the subject here, but I don't understand why video CDN providers don't provide peer to peer solutions yet, such as Streamroot or Peer5
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/netfl...
Despite this logic, they were capable of very impressive P2P offloads during the world cup. Their datasheet linked at the bottom of this blog post is worth a read for more details: https://blog.peer5.com/what-a-world-cup/ (email address needed)
I'm curious on how well that works in practice.
I'd imagine there's more failures modes versus a regular CDN even after the initial decision of P2P or CDN. For example, you're downloading from another user who suddenly closes their app or whose network connection degrades. You can handle that but you'll need a larger buffer, on average, which increases latency.
From a technical perspective, traditional CDNs are struggling to grasp what it means to be a CDN in the peer-to-peer space, their networks have been built to support traditional HTTP traffic, and they've been fairly successful delivering that. Adapting to cacheable peer-to-peer objects would mean large architectural changes.
From a business perspective I suspect they also see a challenge where encouraging people to chase peer-to-peer oriented solutions may increase adoption, and start to reduce the amount of traffic they're serving from their private edge as more viewers start to peer between each other.
P2P doesn't need "always on" boxes in large scale live stream scenarios, which is one of the use cases where it works best. I think we'll see a lot of growth in hybrid P2P/traditional CDN in the next couple of years.