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I wonder what's happening with Bittorrent Live. Maybe the economies of scale of the large companies have made P2P streaming a hard sell? Why install a weird te

I wonder what's happening with Bittorrent Live. Maybe the economies of scale of the large companies have made P2P streaming a hard sell? Why install a weird temperamental app when you can just stream video from Twitch (Amazon) or YouTube or Facebook? They've all invested tens of billions in networking infrastructure and have the necessary advertising structures to recoup the costs.

wmf 10y ago
The economics have definitely changed. CDNs are dirt cheap and are technically simpler and more reliable than P2P. And for live video you probably want transcoding which is also easier to do in the cloud.
- lucasgonze 10y ago
  As former eng lead at a live streaming company, I second the idea that transcoding is a big deal. Streaming bandwidth is super pricey, and the money is enough to really matter. Even a startup can easily get to five or six figure expenses. Bittorrent Live gets that right. However transcoding is critical, given that every OS and browser has its own format quirks. BT Live can't remotely do this. Check out Zencoder for the real competition. Maybe BT Live will find a niche with use cases that just produce no money at all, or where servers get shut down for political reasons. Marches, samizdat, and, uh, questionable copyright.
  - wmf 10y ago
    Twitter is trying to claim the political niche but maybe BT Live can become the home of "too hot for Twitter" streaming. On a personal note, it's great to see the old decentralization crew on this thread.
    - evgen 10y ago
      Lucas and Wes talking p2p and Bram, I think I woke up this morning in '99...
orasis 10y ago
Companies that sell access to live video have two primary concerns: 1) overall user experience including seemless play and video quality 2) customer support burden During a huge scale live event you can't afford to have more than a very small fraction of the users experiencing technical problems.
loader 10y ago
P2P streaming solved a problem when bandwidth cost a lot. Now that it's so much cheaper everyone just chooses to serve it themselves. Even for small operations there's tonnes of cloud options like DO, Scaleway, OVH, et al that offer cheap bandwidth. 10 years ago I paid $12/mbps for dedicated servers just for streaming, now I can get ~200mbps for $5/month (0.025/mbps).

wmf 10y ago

The economics have definitely changed. CDNs are dirt cheap and are technically simpler and more reliable than P2P. And for live video you probably want transcoding which is also easier to do in the cloud.

lucasgonze 10y ago
As former eng lead at a live streaming company, I second the idea that transcoding is a big deal. Streaming bandwidth is super pricey, and the money is enough to really matter. Even a startup can easily get to five or six figure expenses. Bittorrent Live gets that right. However transcoding is critical, given that every OS and browser has its own format quirks. BT Live can't remotely do this. Check out Zencoder for the real competition. Maybe BT Live will find a niche with use cases that just produce no money at all, or where servers get shut down for political reasons. Marches, samizdat, and, uh, questionable copyright.
- wmf 10y ago
  Twitter is trying to claim the political niche but maybe BT Live can become the home of "too hot for Twitter" streaming. On a personal note, it's great to see the old decentralization crew on this thread.
  - evgen 10y ago
    Lucas and Wes talking p2p and Bram, I think I woke up this morning in '99...

orasis 10y ago

Companies that sell access to live video have two primary concerns: 1) overall user experience including seemless play and video quality 2) customer support burden During a huge scale live event you can't afford to have more than a very small fraction of the users experiencing technical problems.

loader 10y ago

P2P streaming solved a problem when bandwidth cost a lot. Now that it's so much cheaper everyone just chooses to serve it themselves. Even for small operations there's tonnes of cloud options like DO, Scaleway, OVH, et al that offer cheap bandwidth. 10 years ago I paid $12/mbps for dedicated servers just for streaming, now I can get ~200mbps for $5/month (0.025/mbps).