Your argument is completely valid in the current context, which is the only that matters. Just FYI, In other contexts these points are more nuanced: > It's slo

Your argument is completely valid in the current context, which is the only that matters. Just FYI, In other contexts these points are more nuanced: > It's slower to deliver video since you're reliant on upload connections of end users. This has been scaling really well for small unfunded projects that need to deliver big binaries, such as open source distributions. > It's less reliable (same reason as above) If you have large corporate or state level actors trying to censor the content, then this becomes the more reliable method. > You have no guarantee that chunks will arrive in the right order to actually stream data (ie the end of the file might download first). This is not fixed by the protocol, but by clients optimizing for total download speed. I think some clients allow you to download more sequentially. > You cannot send multiple different video qualities... Video torrents often come in 720p, 1K and sometimes even 4K versions. So you could pick in advance. But that's not dynamic mid-stream like you mention. Since you offered to write more: Is there such a thing as a progressive codec for audio/video? I vaguely remember video chat codecs doing something like this, where you get progressive degradation if you loose packets. > It's harder to debug network problems... oh yes... I think this is the main reason Skype and Spotify moved away from the P2P tech that they used initially. I hope this becomes less of an issue when projects like LibP2P and IPFS mature and become as reliable and common as TCP/IP and TLS. > Time to start playing a new stream is longer... You can solve many of the issues mentioned above by having high quality sponsored seed servers. This is basically a hybrid approach. The seeds would guarantee good services and the P2P part would reduce load on the seed servers where possible. > It couldn't support live services where the video data is being generated near real time Not Torrent, but there's community of P2P television streams, quite popular for big sports matches. And from what I hear great quality. This is a completely different P2P model, more like a multicast stream. Can not do the sort of on-demand streaming that Netflix would require.