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Comment by seydor | Hacker News Reader

I dont see the point. A centralized data hose that is replacing what internet was designed to be : a decentralized, multi routed network. The problem may be useful to them, but unlikely to be useful to anyone who doesn't already work there. I dunno, if it was possible to monetize decentralized or bittorrent video hosting, i think it would solve the problem in a more interesting and resilient way. With fewer engineers.

But it's like, every discussion today must end with something about the pay and head count of engineers.

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It's funny you mention this. When I worked at Netflix, we looked at making streaming peer to peer. There were a lot of problems with it though. Privacy issues, most people have terrible upload bandwidth from home, people didn't like the idea of their hardware serving other customers, home hardware is flakey so you'd constantly be doing client selection, and other problems.

So it turns out decentralized multi routed is not a good solution for video streaming.

Works great for storing pirated content though

Usually you aren't live streaming your pirated content right off other people's boxes. You download it first and then view it. So you don't need every chunk available at just the right time.

Popcorn Time worked pretty well with just that model; watching more or less immediately is it's downloaded in order from the swarm.

Did you actually use Popcorn time? It got stuck all the time waiting for a chunk. Also, again, people sharing pirated content don't care about privacy and are happy to share their home hardware for other people to use. Paying customers care about that stuff.

Used it dozens of times, usually works fine for the popular content.

Good quality, barely any buffering.

The niche content may be too difficult for a "live" streaming experience.

I have; it worked flawlessly for content that was decently seeded. And that's without the sorts of table stakes you'd expect for a streaming platform like the same content encoded at different bit rates, but chunked on the same boundaries so you can dynamically change bitrate as your buffer depletes.

And I'm not sure most people actually care if their home hardware is being used for whatever by the service they're using, or else there'd be pushback on electron apps from more than just HN.

The sense I always got from Netflix's P2P work was that it was heavily tied into the political battles wrt the BS arguments that Netflix should pay for peering with tier 2 ISPs. Did this work there continue much after that problem went quieter?

Somebody I know (cough) starts torrent downloads in sequential order after downloading the first and last chunk, and then opens the file in VLC while it is downloading.

Works amazingly well for watching something front to back if your download speed is fast enough; you'd never know it wasn't being streamed. The hardest part is finding a good torrent for what you want to watch. Ironically the Netflix catalog is one of the most easily available to pirate since people rip it directly from web.

recently i see a lot of people with very high upload speeds. Nobody is using them though, but nominally they are there.

Sure, very recently. But all the other issues still apply. A real time feed from random people's machines is very difficult at best.

I ve watched a lot of HBO (not available here) on popcorn time

wouldn't a peer-to-peer setup be a non-starter legally? ..or at least incredibly high risk. I could see major ISPs complaining if Netflix is using the upstream side of the ISP's customers for profit.

Yes. :)

No, Microsoft is doing the same thing and nobody cares. Just mention it the small print in the agreement and offer a way to turn it off.

I understand and even share a little bit of your sentiment, but I'm tired of stretched "X is now not what X was supposed to be".

Strictly speaking, the Internet was supposed to help some servers survive and continue working together despite some others being destroyed by a nuke. That is more-or-less the case today: we see how people use VPNs to route around censorship. Whether you were supposed to stream TikTok videos directly from the phones of their authors or through a centralized data hose - i'm not sure that was ever the grand idea.

Also "decentralized" and "monetize" don't go well together because innovation is stimulated by profit margins and rent-free decentralized solutions by definition have those margins equal to zero (otherwise the solution is not decentralized enough).

While we are at it let's just put video streaming on the blockchain! Who needs all these engineers and servers.

But only seven people can stream at once!

Once you download the chain you can watch anything you want! You'll have a local copy of _everything_

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