6 ms·

It's an interesting idea, but I don't think it really works at scale. Reminds me of Spotify starting out with peer to peer and then abandoning it. Especially si

It's an interesting idea, but I don't think it really works at scale. Reminds me of Spotify starting out with peer to peer and then abandoning it. Especially since your users won't accept the costs being shifted to them and their streaming experience being most likely negatively affected if you're apparently a big player. Not to mention the myriad of technical hurdles you'll run into once you start to try to use this world wide. Perhaps if you're only streaming from and to free spirited people who understand what's going on and want to share the burden.

Anil1331 6y ago
Hey thanks for bringing this up. The user experience won't take a hit since video streaming especially live streaming has a lot of issues with cdn and a hybrid architecture of cdn+p2p eases the traffic and reduces the bottlenecks in the network. Similarly for people accessing content from remote locations always face a lot of issues since the cdn centers stay away in metro cities. Their experience would be enhanced too since they can now fetch the content from a nearby peer than a far-away cdn Users who wish to be part of the network for better experience streaming the content can be part of the network. Also there are options available to enable/disable p2p for 4g/wifi/based on location and various other constraints to take care of user experience.
- Jasper_ 6y ago
  I remember when Skype was trying out a similar feature for P2P video, where user devices would be used to help forward other connections and calls. My phone left a scorch mark on my (admittedly cheap) countertop because the battery was running so hot. As a user, battery life and bandwidth limits are super important to me, and this seems like a thing that will eat through both.
  - Anil1331 6y ago
    Ideally the only addition is few network requests which should not consume a lot of battery. In our experiments we have seen not much of a difference in consumption of battery With regards to bandwidth there are options to limit upload and disable it for 4g/for certain location
- dawnerd 6y ago
  I’m sorry maybe I misunderstand the tech but how does a user have the choice when a site pushes this on them? The average user won’t know what peer to peer is or understand that they’re sharing their bandwidth with strangers.
  - Anil1331 6y ago
    It is up-to the site to enable/disbale p2p. Incase the user wants to disable himself/herself they can do from browser.
- zbentley 6y ago
  > Similarly for people accessing content from remote locations always face a lot of issues since the cdn centers stay away in metro cities. Their experience would be enhanced too since they can now fetch the content from a nearby peer than a far-away cdn This is an interesting idea. If this gets widespread-enough adoption, and if non-metro folks can, on average, find a nearby peer for $whatever they're looking for (and those are very big "if"s), I still imagine some problems might crop up: Determining "distance" is quite tricky, and the trickiness goes up substantially the further onto rural/less normal latency distribution networks/ISPs you get--and that's just in the first world. If latency is the main signal used to inform distance, you could end up inflicting a pretty punishing upload-bandwidth cost on users/ISPs because of, for example, a fortuitous peering agreement upstream. There may also be a significant penalty paid for "medium distance" non-hub-routed peers: situations in which the presence of many uploaders congest the last-mile/backhaul infrastructure of small-scale providers that are least capable of managing the unexpected surge in consumption (least capable as in: most congestion-prone infrastructure and fewest technical solutions on hand to mitigate unexpected long-term congestion). And in places where small-scale providers don't control much of the market and mobile networks are the main bandwidth providers, expect a swift no-warning traffic block. There are ways to circumvent those, but they get expensive (in engineering time, user experience, and user bandwidth) fast.
  - Anil1331 6y ago
    The users are paired based on metrics like location/network speed etc. Also users in same ISP are paired And it is a swarm based network which by default will never overload a single peer and shares the bandwidth across all the peers in general

Anil1331 6y ago

Hey thanks for bringing this up. The user experience won't take a hit since video streaming especially live streaming has a lot of issues with cdn and a hybrid architecture of cdn+p2p eases the traffic and reduces the bottlenecks in the network. Similarly for people accessing content from remote locations always face a lot of issues since the cdn centers stay away in metro cities. Their experience would be enhanced too since they can now fetch the content from a nearby peer than a far-away cdn Users who wish to be part of the network for better experience streaming the content can be part of the network. Also there are options available to enable/disable p2p for 4g/wifi/based on location and various other constraints to take care of user experience.

Jasper_ 6y ago
I remember when Skype was trying out a similar feature for P2P video, where user devices would be used to help forward other connections and calls. My phone left a scorch mark on my (admittedly cheap) countertop because the battery was running so hot. As a user, battery life and bandwidth limits are super important to me, and this seems like a thing that will eat through both.
- Anil1331 6y ago
  Ideally the only addition is few network requests which should not consume a lot of battery. In our experiments we have seen not much of a difference in consumption of battery With regards to bandwidth there are options to limit upload and disable it for 4g/for certain location
dawnerd 6y ago
I’m sorry maybe I misunderstand the tech but how does a user have the choice when a site pushes this on them? The average user won’t know what peer to peer is or understand that they’re sharing their bandwidth with strangers.
- Anil1331 6y ago
  It is up-to the site to enable/disbale p2p. Incase the user wants to disable himself/herself they can do from browser.
zbentley 6y ago
> Similarly for people accessing content from remote locations always face a lot of issues since the cdn centers stay away in metro cities. Their experience would be enhanced too since they can now fetch the content from a nearby peer than a far-away cdn This is an interesting idea. If this gets widespread-enough adoption, and if non-metro folks can, on average, find a nearby peer for $whatever they're looking for (and those are very big "if"s), I still imagine some problems might crop up: Determining "distance" is quite tricky, and the trickiness goes up substantially the further onto rural/less normal latency distribution networks/ISPs you get--and that's just in the first world. If latency is the main signal used to inform distance, you could end up inflicting a pretty punishing upload-bandwidth cost on users/ISPs because of, for example, a fortuitous peering agreement upstream. There may also be a significant penalty paid for "medium distance" non-hub-routed peers: situations in which the presence of many uploaders congest the last-mile/backhaul infrastructure of small-scale providers that are least capable of managing the unexpected surge in consumption (least capable as in: most congestion-prone infrastructure and fewest technical solutions on hand to mitigate unexpected long-term congestion). And in places where small-scale providers don't control much of the market and mobile networks are the main bandwidth providers, expect a swift no-warning traffic block. There are ways to circumvent those, but they get expensive (in engineering time, user experience, and user bandwidth) fast.
- Anil1331 6y ago
  The users are paired based on metrics like location/network speed etc. Also users in same ISP are paired And it is a swarm based network which by default will never overload a single peer and shares the bandwidth across all the peers in general