I suspect some of the issues you're having understanding my comments is I've assumed you had a working knowledge of RMTP. Basically the protocol comprises of m

I suspect some of the issues you're having understanding my comments is I've assumed you had a working knowledge of RMTP. Basically the protocol comprises of multiple streams of various bit rates. These streams are chunked into blocks of n seconds. This is often around 15 seconds or less. The client will hot swap between each stream if one chunk takes too long or downloads too quick. This ensures that the video quality dynamically scales to the best bitrate your bandwidth will handle and it does so quickly and with minimal buffering. It works for video on demand services but it also works for live feeds as well and the whole thing can be served over multicast or UDP for further savings at either the DC or across the wire. Bittorrent is nowhere near optimised enough to compete on that level. The 2minute buffering you guessed at would easily look terrible in side by side comparisons with RMTP deliveries. Not to mention a whole boat load of hardware encoders (rack mountable gear used in broadcasters) are built for spitting out RTMP streams yet none (at least that I'm aware of) exist for BT. So you'd have to build your own gear as well as content delivery network. That alone would cost you far more than any savings P2P deployment might earn you.