3 ms·
It's all about economics. Yes, torrents have some downsides - forever they can be worked through at some cost of quality. I might see some delays occasionally
by abraae 8y ago
It's all about economics.
Yes, torrents have some downsides - forever they can be worked through at some cost of quality. I might see some delays occasionally for example while I wait for an it is sequence chunk to arrive.
However for some content/use cases, perhaps that will be acceptable.
Right now the economics favor a dedicated and reliable changes from the source - e.g Netflix.
Perhaps one day another use case will appear where the massive cost benefits of piggybacking off other people's resources comes into its own.
- laumars 8y agoI've done some work on with broadcasters distributing video assets over IP and honestly I can't see bittorrent ever being used. Once multicast over RMTP becomes reliable (which broadcasters are working towards) then the one advantage bittorrent has (reducing bandwidth from source) becomes moot for live services. Video on demand services would still have bandwidth issues but its less "spikey" and you'd factor that into the running cost of the service (and thus what you charge customers / advertisers). But I guess "never say never?"
- canhascodez 8y agoWell, do you think that BT might have the potential to reduce bandwidth costs? And what difference might that make to the overall cost of doing business?
- laumars 8y agoI think ISPs might quickly stop P2P video delivery if it became the norm because there's no way they would want to pay for the bandwidth. Or those costs will just get passed onto the consumers. Either way, it's not free bandwidth. In terms of video streaming services, there's other ways to reduce bandwidth costs without resorting to P2P. Multicast being the prime candidate as that's where you send one IP packet which targets multiple different endpoints (rather than unicast which is the typical point to point method of IP comms)