[reliablereason]

The only entities that could use such a thing are major streaming platforms, and projects trying to stream copyrighted content without consent.

The former don't want to use it as it degrades their control over the content, and the later don't want to make a new system cause systems that are built on torrents are good enough.

[littlestymaar]

I worked for a company called Streamroot which sold exactly this, and I can tell your first paragraph is indeed correct but the second isn't: we had major streaming platforms as customers when I was there (not global giants like Netflix or YouTube, but big european players like Canal+ or Eurosport) and we also had plenty of warez websites (streaming sport, animes, porn, etc.).

I then left and the company later got acquired by Level 3 so I don't know exactly how it evolved but it's likely that they abandoned the illegal streaming market for reputational reasons and stuck with big players.

[LeonM]

> I then left and the company later got acquired by Level 3 so I don't know exactly how it evolved

It just struck me that there are probably plenty of large media companies that use all sorts of proprietary video streaming products for distribution that we've never heard of, simply because the tech isn't available to consumers.

Media companies are generally pretty secretive about their tech (Netflix being the exception to this rule), so there isn't much to be found about this. The piracy community (because, let's be real here) also won't be interested in a non-free (speech and beer) streaming solutions like these. So that's probably why there is just very little public information available.

But if you use paid digital TV products (Eurosport being a perfect example here) then you are probably already using all sorts of P2P streaming protocols you've never heard of.

[aaron695]

> degrades their control over the content

Encryption (can work with sharing), signatures, fall back to CDN. Control is not an issue.

> torrents are good enough.

Torrents can't do the massive market of livestream, like sports or season finales or reality TV / news. This is the entire point of the question.

> The only entities

And everyone kicked off of YouTube or doesn't want to use big corporations on principal, like Hacker Cons or the open source community.

[notpushkin]

> Encryption (can work with sharing), signatures, fall back to CDN. Control is not an issue.

And of course if an encryption key gets leaked, you can just rotate it. Since it’s a stream, past content is not as important.

(That said, I don’t think it will help — any DRM can be cracked, and there’s plenty of online TV streaming sites even with the current centralized systems.)

[Calwestjobs]

you can stream blockbuster movie which got released yesterday. DRM is important.

[Calwestjobs]

"Torrents can't do the massive market of livestream" CAN do, why are we not using them is not technical reason, it is that most people just pay apple tv / netflix and not have to install anything on their computer, and UI / interface is 10000 times better.

or very similar point - i had conversation with some big youtuber and person was confused why he is not more popular with certain demographic. reason was that said demographic was watching on big TV and content he was filming was big head directly in front of camera. so they do not like having 3 feet big head right in front of them... most young people watch things on mobile..