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by Sparkyte 703 days ago
So I am kind of opposed to piracy but the novel idea of a peer based CDN has its merit. Imagine an encrypted framework where Netflix operates in a peer to peer communication. It would drastically reduce the overhead a streaming service would require to send content to users. If people are all watching the similar content or opt-in to supporting the network chunks of data could stored across many customer peers to complete the mesh. This would allow high quality content with a reduced amount of latency for delivery. It is why piracy took of during the DSL/Cable era. Networks were not fast and streaming could not work that efficiently so a p2p network alievated the stress allowing viewers/listeners to grab media and be quick about it.
2 comments
zozskuh 702 days ago
Spotify used to run a P2P network to serve music[1], which they seemed to have shut down in 2014[2].

[1] https://www.csc.kth.se/~gkreitz/spotify-p2p10/spotify-p2p10....

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/17/spotify-removes-peer-to-pe...

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tristor 703 days ago
Honestly, this would be a great efficiency boost if you could figure out how to manage distributed access, even in the existing model. Content servers in the CDN could act like origins/seedboxes, and pieces could be streamed from other clients based on what's currently contained in their content cache or downloaded episodes bucket. I'd love to see Netflix do something like this as long as it was only for non-mobile clients (e.g. Xbox, AppleTV, et al). I don't mind sharing my upstream with others if it helps smooth delivery for myself.

You'd think this wouldn't work well, but if done properly it'd be at worst equivalent to the current experience (e.g. your entire stream comes only from the closest content server), but Netflix shows tend to have popularity trends so may actually perform better than the current experience because you might be watching the same show as your neighbor, just 20-30 minutes later, and this reduces load on the content servers and raises the overall throughput availability of the total network.

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Sparkyte 703 days ago
Exactly my thoughts! Remember the good old days when World of Warcraft used peer distribution of their installations?
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