Before you needed to run expensive transcoding jobs to be able to support heterogenous clients. Once we get Simulcast the only cost will be bandwidth.
With Hetzner I am paying $1 a TB. With AV1 or H265 + Simulcast I am getting 4K for hundreds of users on just a single server.
We will have some growing pains, but I am not giving up until I can make this accessible to everyone.
So if you've got ~18 Gbps of upload bandwidth you're ready for 10,000-20,000 viewers.
Assuming a single gigabit symmetric connection could dedicate at most 100mb of upload bandwidth, you'd need one such viewer per each 25 viewers with a worse connection. This feels achievable.
You'd have 1 server that broadcasts to at most 10K tier-1 viewers. Tier 2 viewers get 3 tier1 ips for failover, and pre-negotiate a connection with them, e.g. through STUn, to get sub-second failovers in case their primary source quits the stream. A central control plane load balances these.
With something like 15s of buffer (acceptable for a gaming stream, not so much for sports, where your neighbors might be watching on satellite and cheer), this feels achievable.
Are all of the issues P2P brings really worth it?
I'd say this definitely opens up streaming from your desktop with 1 CPU core handling a SFU for say 100 viewers = 500Mb or from a $5/month VPS if you've not got the capacity at home. That's pretty awesome, for most people no need to use P2P.
CGNAT is going to make that a hassle.
i'm so effing tired of NAT here and NAT there and NATs in between NATs. NAT complicates things for almost no reason now that ipv6 was released almost 30 years ago. Wait, what? 30 years? Now I'm VERY shocked at how little ipv6 has been deployed.
You don't even need gigabit connections to make p2p work: a video stream is usually between 1-10mbps, with which you can do p2p even with a regular connection.
(I used to work for a start-up doing p2p streaming using WebRTC in the browser, we got up to 90% efficiency on live streaming back in 2015, and 80% for VoD).
I'm still very confused that this technology hasn't become mainstream (there are privacy concerns, but that doesn't usually stop the tech market…).
If we assumed an average of 6Mb per stream that's 3000 streams, practically speaking a little lower.
It's all relative I guess but it's not that high.
https://networkengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/47994...
Now I see this news?! Perfect timing. (:
I like this guy.