you mean popcorntime? or webtorrent + thepiratebay.org?
these get shut down due to legal issues, but, from a technical perspective, building netflix using bittorrent (or ipfs) is 100% doable and quite reliable
Until you want to watch that one kinda obscure thing that isn't adequately seeded... then your out of luck. (I'm aware of server "pre-seed"/enhancement options this just assumes you want to watch something that isn't seeded or pre-seeded)
That's because it isn't done legally, and therefore augmenting the network with a few "supernodes" (I believe that's what napster called them) is a big no-no. You could say the same about Netflix/HBO/..., by the way. Watching obscure things (that aren't worth Netflix or the copyright owner's time to negotiate rights for ... good luck). And if the present trend continues, and Disney, and Paramount, and ... start their own streaming platforms with exclusivity, well, popcorntime is going to be the vastly superior option in a year or two at most.
In the other case for a distributed example, you have the Steam platform. Obscure things download quickly and without much delay. And steam avoids the "rights negotiating" problem by being a marketplace.
BitTorrent is also much less stable than Netflix in terms of speed of access and availability of any given file, since the distribution of content distributes control as well as work. Peer discovery alone makes BitTorrent less performant than Netflix, for media which Netflix has to offer.
That's not necessarily correct. Depending on the time of day and your ISP, P2P video can be much more reliable than Netflix. Esp because you usually control quality. With Netflix, it can happen that the client decides to force you on a low resolution because they think the connection is slow. That creates quality issues you don't get with P2P.
Agreed! However, I must note that Netflix doesn't use AWS (or any cloud provider) for streaming content. Everything you're watching on Netflix is streamed from one of their own NAS boxes located in or around your ISP. AWS is used for everything else (i.e. billing, suggestions, ratings, feedback, support, transcoding, etc.)
Yes streaming is a large part of Netflix but it's not the only part, and may not be the largest part. Netflix has over 30,000 EC2 instances running AWS plus a lot of other resources (S3, redis, etc.) Building Netflix on your own platform would be foolish.
these get shut down due to legal issues, but, from a technical perspective, building netflix using bittorrent (or ipfs) is 100% doable and quite reliable