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You also let the end users be your uplink speed, your availability, your malware delivery vectors, your customer complaint generators. BT is not a magic bullet

You also let the end users be your uplink speed, your availability, your malware delivery vectors, your customer complaint generators. BT is not a magic bullet, it's actually pretty shitty in a lot of ways, and if it wasn't giant bandwidth hungry companies like yt and netflix would have been using it 10 years ago, along with every cdn on the planet

thomastjeffery 3y ago
You can set up a server or two with fast uplinks as users. That raises the floor for bandwidth and availability just fine. The problem with content delivery is not the floor: it's the ceiling. A CDN requires much more than a server or two. Bittorrent does not. With bittorrent, you will never hit the ceiling, because every user that enters the room raises that ceiling for the rest. The only reason that Netflix uses a CDN is copyright. Netflix as a platform fundamentally exists to put DRM between the content creator and the viewer. If the content creators were not interested in wrapping their content in DRM, then they would gladly share it via bittorrent. In fact, Spotify actually started as a P2P network. Once they were big enough, they switched to a CDN so that they could provide the DRM that copyright holders wanted. The rest of your complaints are about moderation, which are also a feature of copyright. Plenty of people would gladly create trackers and forums that curate content the way you want. They don't, because that's illegal. Copyright took the most basic computing fundamental - copying files - and turned it into a black market. Get rid of copyright, and people will gladly GPG sign their torrents to eliminate the malware vector. Get rid of copyright, and people will gladly share the original raw copy of a file, or a lossy format that was encoded only once (with proof). Hell, we already had that; except it had to be done in the form of private trackers, because just putting everything on a cheap server (to raise the floor) was too much legal liability; so the floor had to be raised by guaranteeing seeders. Now even that is gone, because the best private trackers (like WhatCD) get taken down by governments, and it's nearly impossible to coordinate a replacement in a black market.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  This sounds a little too familiar to the "IPFS would work as a video service" argument that was so vehemently annihilated. Look, I hate copyright and download my own Fair Use archives of many YouTube videos. I'm the last person who would be ideologically opposed to this. Even still, it should not be surprising why ad-subsidized CDNs are popular. YouTube "won" because it's the only platform out of everything listed that works: - Rights-holders are happy that IP control is monopolized (eg. YouTube movies and music limitations) - Viewers are happy to get something in return for an ad rather than sorting out an arbitrary seeding ratio - Creators are happy that the most technical part of their publishing process is figuring out what "Drag and Drop" means P2P systems like that break, unless you put a CDN in front of them. Once you scale to YouTube-level architecture, P2P doesn't keep scaling except when you control the major peers. At that point, you are so close to building a CDN pipeline that you might as well just do it.
  - thomastjeffery 3y ago
    > This sounds a little too familiar to the "IPFS would work as a video service" argument that was so vehemently annihilated. Where? How? I surely never heard about it being "annihilated". --- Did you even read my comment? I talked about rights-holders monopolizing content, and I talked about seeding ratios. Those are the problem that is holding back P2P video service, not winning at its competition. > P2P systems like that break, unless you put a CDN in front of them. The "CDN in front of them" need only be a server or two! That's not what CDN means at all.
    - wutwutwat 3y ago
      A server or two? How long do you expect random youtube user #3283949382 to seed a video and tie up their outbound bandwidth to help out a multibillion dollar corporation? Most residential uplinks suck, and are a fraction of the downlink's speed, even on gigabit packages. It's annoyingly easy to saturate your uplink and because TCP depends on two way communication, not being able to send ACKs back to a server cripples your download speeds. You honestly expect your average youtube or netflix user to understand p2p, seeding, and have enough network chops to add some QOS to avoid tanking their internet connection? What about hard drive space? What about the fact most internet packages have monthly bandwidth caps? So no, they would need to have enough servers to deliver their videos on a "cold cache" because they could never rely on any user seeding their content for very long, if at all. Can 1 or two servers handle all of youtube's egress if no other peers were online? No. And we haven't even touched on the philosophical angle where undoubtably there will be users who say something like "I don't want videos about x passing through my systems" or "director so and so is a person I decided to hate I refuse to seed their content" because that would happen sure as the rising tide. You know that a mass amount of child porn is uploaded to youtube daily right? They have teams of humans who's jobs are to review flagged videos for kiddy porn and remove it from their systems. Do you want child porn seeded from your computers and internet connection? I don't. That's a good way to get your door kicked in by the fbi. How do you delete a file shared with bt or any other p2p protocol? You can't. It's literally impossible to delete a file once seeded out there and I sure as shit am not giving any company the ability to spread child porn using my systems nor am I giving them the ability to delete files from my systems. Do you not see the security nightmare? The legal nightmare? p2p is great but it's entirely impractical to say it can replace cdns or pops and be as reliable for the businesses serving content, because it's not. And since youtube or netflix can't depend on any consistent performance or be able to do any future forecasting since it is all entirely out of their control, they would never do such a thing. And even if they did, as an end user, I don't want to be a free seed box for any business out there, even if they are giving me ad free viewing as "payment" for hijacking my expensive internet connection, hard drive space, cpu time, and electricity. The choices are an unreliable and extremely complicated mess of NICs spread across the globe with unpredictable uptime, unknown security, and slow and/or flaky uplinks, that needs to honor millions of users unique personal believes, privacy concerns, fair system use requests, and opt-outs, which expose them to be distributors of illegal materials while also putting their own user base at risk of criminal prosecution... or tightly controlled, fully owned pipelines of secure systems in datacenters with fast nics connected literally to the backbone of the internet There is no choice here for any business trying to keep customers happy and make money, sorry.
realusername 3y ago
Giant companies don't use it because they want full control on their platform. Neflix is still way more inefficient and resource wasteful than bitorrent but the copyright holders would never agree on not being able to control everything. Letting the user having the video is a taboo in the industry.
- lakomen 3y ago
  And yet, it's the only reason why I don't pay a subscription for film & series but also games. I know that many don't care about that. How many times have I re-watched Star Trek TNG? With a subscription based model I would have to pay every time I get the random urge to watch even a single episode. And that payment isn't cheap either. In this day and age there's a constant struggle for self reliance (or independence) and avoiding lock in.
  - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
    > And that payment isn't cheap either. It's like $6 a month. I don't like paying for something I don't have control over either, but it's definitely affordable to pay for Paramount+ to satisfy a TNG rewatch every few months or whatever.
    - thomastjeffery 3y ago
      Netflix is $6.99 with ads. $15.49 for 1080p. $22.99 for 4K. Only the 4K option meaningfully competes with torrents.
      - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
        We were talking about Paramount+ which has all the trek shows, not Netflix.
        thomastjeffery 3y ago
        Look just a few comments up: we were talking about Netflix. Then TNG, then Paramount+. Netflix didn't stop being relevant to the overall discussion.

thomastjeffery 3y ago

You can set up a server or two with fast uplinks as users. That raises the floor for bandwidth and availability just fine. The problem with content delivery is not the floor: it's the ceiling. A CDN requires much more than a server or two. Bittorrent does not. With bittorrent, you will never hit the ceiling, because every user that enters the room raises that ceiling for the rest. The only reason that Netflix uses a CDN is copyright. Netflix as a platform fundamentally exists to put DRM between the content creator and the viewer. If the content creators were not interested in wrapping their content in DRM, then they would gladly share it via bittorrent. In fact, Spotify actually started as a P2P network. Once they were big enough, they switched to a CDN so that they could provide the DRM that copyright holders wanted. The rest of your complaints are about moderation, which are also a feature of copyright. Plenty of people would gladly create trackers and forums that curate content the way you want. They don't, because that's illegal. Copyright took the most basic computing fundamental - copying files - and turned it into a black market. Get rid of copyright, and people will gladly GPG sign their torrents to eliminate the malware vector. Get rid of copyright, and people will gladly share the original raw copy of a file, or a lossy format that was encoded only once (with proof). Hell, we already had that; except it had to be done in the form of private trackers, because just putting everything on a cheap server (to raise the floor) was too much legal liability; so the floor had to be raised by guaranteeing seeders. Now even that is gone, because the best private trackers (like WhatCD) get taken down by governments, and it's nearly impossible to coordinate a replacement in a black market.

smoldesu 3y ago
This sounds a little too familiar to the "IPFS would work as a video service" argument that was so vehemently annihilated. Look, I hate copyright and download my own Fair Use archives of many YouTube videos. I'm the last person who would be ideologically opposed to this. Even still, it should not be surprising why ad-subsidized CDNs are popular. YouTube "won" because it's the only platform out of everything listed that works: - Rights-holders are happy that IP control is monopolized (eg. YouTube movies and music limitations) - Viewers are happy to get something in return for an ad rather than sorting out an arbitrary seeding ratio - Creators are happy that the most technical part of their publishing process is figuring out what "Drag and Drop" means P2P systems like that break, unless you put a CDN in front of them. Once you scale to YouTube-level architecture, P2P doesn't keep scaling except when you control the major peers. At that point, you are so close to building a CDN pipeline that you might as well just do it.
- thomastjeffery 3y ago
  > This sounds a little too familiar to the "IPFS would work as a video service" argument that was so vehemently annihilated. Where? How? I surely never heard about it being "annihilated". --- Did you even read my comment? I talked about rights-holders monopolizing content, and I talked about seeding ratios. Those are the problem that is holding back P2P video service, not winning at its competition. > P2P systems like that break, unless you put a CDN in front of them. The "CDN in front of them" need only be a server or two! That's not what CDN means at all.
  - wutwutwat 3y ago
    A server or two? How long do you expect random youtube user #3283949382 to seed a video and tie up their outbound bandwidth to help out a multibillion dollar corporation? Most residential uplinks suck, and are a fraction of the downlink's speed, even on gigabit packages. It's annoyingly easy to saturate your uplink and because TCP depends on two way communication, not being able to send ACKs back to a server cripples your download speeds. You honestly expect your average youtube or netflix user to understand p2p, seeding, and have enough network chops to add some QOS to avoid tanking their internet connection? What about hard drive space? What about the fact most internet packages have monthly bandwidth caps? So no, they would need to have enough servers to deliver their videos on a "cold cache" because they could never rely on any user seeding their content for very long, if at all. Can 1 or two servers handle all of youtube's egress if no other peers were online? No. And we haven't even touched on the philosophical angle where undoubtably there will be users who say something like "I don't want videos about x passing through my systems" or "director so and so is a person I decided to hate I refuse to seed their content" because that would happen sure as the rising tide. You know that a mass amount of child porn is uploaded to youtube daily right? They have teams of humans who's jobs are to review flagged videos for kiddy porn and remove it from their systems. Do you want child porn seeded from your computers and internet connection? I don't. That's a good way to get your door kicked in by the fbi. How do you delete a file shared with bt or any other p2p protocol? You can't. It's literally impossible to delete a file once seeded out there and I sure as shit am not giving any company the ability to spread child porn using my systems nor am I giving them the ability to delete files from my systems. Do you not see the security nightmare? The legal nightmare? p2p is great but it's entirely impractical to say it can replace cdns or pops and be as reliable for the businesses serving content, because it's not. And since youtube or netflix can't depend on any consistent performance or be able to do any future forecasting since it is all entirely out of their control, they would never do such a thing. And even if they did, as an end user, I don't want to be a free seed box for any business out there, even if they are giving me ad free viewing as "payment" for hijacking my expensive internet connection, hard drive space, cpu time, and electricity. The choices are an unreliable and extremely complicated mess of NICs spread across the globe with unpredictable uptime, unknown security, and slow and/or flaky uplinks, that needs to honor millions of users unique personal believes, privacy concerns, fair system use requests, and opt-outs, which expose them to be distributors of illegal materials while also putting their own user base at risk of criminal prosecution... or tightly controlled, fully owned pipelines of secure systems in datacenters with fast nics connected literally to the backbone of the internet There is no choice here for any business trying to keep customers happy and make money, sorry.

realusername 3y ago

Giant companies don't use it because they want full control on their platform. Neflix is still way more inefficient and resource wasteful than bitorrent but the copyright holders would never agree on not being able to control everything. Letting the user having the video is a taboo in the industry.

lakomen 3y ago
And yet, it's the only reason why I don't pay a subscription for film & series but also games. I know that many don't care about that. How many times have I re-watched Star Trek TNG? With a subscription based model I would have to pay every time I get the random urge to watch even a single episode. And that payment isn't cheap either. In this day and age there's a constant struggle for self reliance (or independence) and avoiding lock in.
- PrimeMcFly 3y ago
  > And that payment isn't cheap either. It's like $6 a month. I don't like paying for something I don't have control over either, but it's definitely affordable to pay for Paramount+ to satisfy a TNG rewatch every few months or whatever.
  - thomastjeffery 3y ago
    Netflix is $6.99 with ads. $15.49 for 1080p. $22.99 for 4K. Only the 4K option meaningfully competes with torrents.
    - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
      We were talking about Paramount+ which has all the trek shows, not Netflix.
      - thomastjeffery 3y ago
        Look just a few comments up: we were talking about Netflix. Then TNG, then Paramount+. Netflix didn't stop being relevant to the overall discussion.