[nick89]

> Maybe then, we would've gotten a free, open, p2p alternative out of the ashes.

P2P is not the answer. It may work for the 1% (popular videos), but for the 99% it does not provide a viable alternative for on-demand content... I don't want to wait 5 hours for a 3 year old how-to video to stream from a single seed with limited upload capacity :(.

E.g. Look at torrents. Popular ones are readily available, but obscure or old torrents will be lucky to have a single seed.

[throwawaykf05]

What percentage of the bandwidth is consumed by popular videos, and what percentage by the long tail? P2P can alleviate a big chunk of the popular content bandwidth. Not sure how much that is, though.

In a P2P world, if you're uploading a long tail video of your cat that only your family will watch, maybe it's up to you to "seed that torrent" - or more realistically, keep your machine running so that your peer can serve the content to theirs. It's the move from desktops to mobile and laptop devices that run only sporadically that is the real problem for P2P.