[edoloughlin]

Imagine if Netflix wasn't accessible to Comcast users from the beginning because they wouldn't pay the toll. Would it have thrived and grown as quickly as it did, or would it have died in it's infancy?

If I was building a bandwidth-intensive startup in the US at the moment, I'd be seriously looking at using port-hopping p2p as my distribution mechanism with some randomisation of the payload to make profiling/identification as difficult as possible.

[exelius]

p2p is a terrible distribution mechanism; it's pretty flaky and it destroys battery life on mobile devices which is where most of the growth in the tech sector is right now. Also there are issues with DRM in p2p. Yeah I know, DRM isn't popular, but video content owners insist on it and distributors can't do anything about that.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Also there are issues with DRM in p2p.

I never actually understood this. DRM is already largely ineffective, but how would P2P distribution make it any more ineffective? It would be trivial to distribute encrypted content using P2P and then DRM the decryption.

[exelius]

Modern DRM schemes use one-time keys. E.g. you can pull down a video stream, but you have to respond with your session ID and a login token which they then verify against subscriber information.

And the whole point of DRM is to allow content providers to enforce the restrictions they place on content distribution contracts. For example, if there is a flag that says "this content can only be played on cell-phones and tablets" they want to ensure that any player that can play the content honors that restriction and doesn't allow output via HDMI.

Naturally some people will be able to defeat them, but they're not meant to be ironclad. They are effective for the majority of people out there who aren't hackers/nerds.

[wmf]

I think each file is only encrypted once and the file master key is then wrapped with a one-time key. That is completely compatible with P2P.

[x0x0]

spotify made it work: their desktop client is a p2p network

[darrinm]

They're shutting the p2p network down: http://www.digitaltrends.com/music/spotify-shuts-p2p-network...

[Retric]

p2p can work well, world of Warcraft being a prime example. DRM is also no problem for an easy solution just have a few important bits in another file which is downloaded separately. The real issue is rock solid multithreaded low level networking code is way beyond the skill level of the average ruby on rails code monkey.

[CamperBob2]

Then Comcast will simply charge out the nose for the ability to send more than a trivial amount of data.

[AnthonyMouse]

They effectively already do this by selling highly asymmetric connections. They can't do much more than they already are because you have to have enough upload bandwidth to acknowledge all the packets you receive when downloading. And too many customers (and large companies) would complain to Congress if uploading a picture to InstaGram or a clip to YouTube took several minutes or cost a lot of money.

[secabeen]

That would impact the ability of users to access corporate VPNs and work from home. My hope is that that's a large enough user base that they can't limit it too much.