| True P2P streaming is more trouble than its worth. Take it from a guy who streams petabytes a month and has looked into it more times than most. P2P has 2 main advantages, both of which are voided by this implementation: 1: Better latency. If Joe talks directly to Sue, that is the fastest connection possible, as opposed to Joe -> Server -> Sue 2: The host saves on bandwidth costs Now, point #1 is moot because this needs servers to work for live broadcasts with lots of viewers. Also, even if server were not on the mix, you are still going to need your data relayed several times depending on how far from the source you are. You cannot hype away the fact that if a person is streaming a 1080p video at 1mb/s and the average peer has less than 5mb/s outbound, that the delay in getting that video to the thousandth viewer is going to be exponential unless you add in servers anyways. Point #2 is mostly moot for 2 reasons. The first reason is the cost of bandwidth is almost dirt cheap now. You can get a unmetered 1gb/s line for under $200/month.
The second reason is that when you go full P2P, you lose out on a lot of value adds that people like. Things like transcoding for different sizes / mobile as well as DVR style seeking/recording. Another reason which I am sure will be hotly contested by the developers is that the quality will be more unreliable than a direct server. Last mile Peers are the worst for sending data. You want to typically be in a hub for direct peering to the various end points (comcast/tw/etc.) In most cases, Its unfortunately the case that P2P causes exponentially more headaches than it solves. Now, that is not to say that multicast does not have its place in the world. Just that its more of a feature to compliment traditional relay streaming vs being a product on its own. |
#1 if Jose is streaming to Sue, there's no middle server here. PPSP doesn't mandate a "central server", and I hope on the swirl website I can make this use case clear too.
I'd love us to be able to stream from our devices to friends etc and not need to store everything on youtube or dropbox or some other indexed/sliced/diced/resold for profit system. With PPSP however you could have your home network be a peer, and pull down the content safe and sound with minimal impact to your phone. This type of sharing is something I would love to roll out for journalists in the field, protesters in Venezuela and Ukraine, where media suppression by the government and confiscation of phones is a sad reality.
#2 Spoken like a true American ;-). This is not the reality for 99% of the internet users. I'm unable to get more than shoddy ADSL, even in a major European city. What about India, China, Africa, South America? Places where the monthly income is not even close to $200. Hopefully that will change over time, but it's not practical for most people today.
I concur that live P2P streaming is tricky, and I'm sure you have plenty of practical experience to back that up.
PPSP allows DVR style seek / record, the way the protocol is laid out makes that almost trivial. Now if your device at home doesn't have that content, you'll need to retrieve that from a peer, and I'd like to see that peer be close to you.
Today, with bit torrent & friends, there's no standard implementation to refer to, so there's no way for an ISP to put an intermediary cache in to support the functionality you want, assuming you're paying a premium for that content, which is what is done with HTTP & friends on a regular basis.
By having a standard protocol in place, multiple implementations & vendors can share the same caching peer technology within a single telco's network. Those peers can be located at edges within the exchange, similar to how major CDNs and google etc do today.
Finally, PPSP is more than just streaming, it's a completely new transport layer protocol for the internet -- like HTTP, we're only just beginning to explore the use cases.