This was tried relatively unsuccessfully by a company named Red Swoosh (Travis Kalnik's baby before Uber). [1] The concept pre-dates BitTorrent, and the techno

This was tried relatively unsuccessfully by a company named Red Swoosh (Travis Kalnik's baby before Uber). [1] The concept pre-dates BitTorrent, and the technology worked pretty well, I deployed it at scale. There were two big problems. First, users had to install the client which they didn't like doing. Second, users had to share their bandwidth and cache data they may not care about. In the real world, that turned out to be deal breakers, we had to drop Red Swoosh. I think the larger picture here, is if your Netflix, you're happy to centralize, put distro points of ISP networks, etc. to provide a great user experience. How many people would be annoyed about Netflix dragging down their internet connection to make the service a couple of bucks cheaper? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Swoosh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Swoosh