[jacquesm]

We had peer to peer streaming 18 years ago. It does not scale for larger audiences, so if it stays on the 'skype' level then it will do fine, otherwise you're going to need some kind of redistribution network to handle the fan-out.

If you're willing to tolerate lag and decreasing fidelity you can also use peer-to-peer relaying but this only works for a very limited number of hops.

[latch]

I'm also skeptical. Off the top of my head, if I had to make this work, I might try two things:

1 - While streaming normally from the CDN, also preload segments from peers. Complexity and client-bloat aside, you don't lose much trying (assuming the client has the bandwidth)

2 - Peering with folk that appear to be close. I feel that doing it by network address or ip->geo lookup might work well.

[Rodi]

Hey, founder of the p2p service described in the article here (www.streamroot.io)

This is exactly what we are doing :) We have have a hybrid p2p model that fetches video segments from others peers as long as it can, and switches back to CDN on urgency cases. And our tracker uses geoIp data, ISP and some network topology elements to connect the best candidates together