[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