Nope. On a peer to peer network, download equals upload. If you arrive late, sure, everyone will upload to you. But if you arrive in the middle of the viral

Nope. On a peer to peer network, download equals upload. If you arrive late, sure, everyone will upload to you. But if you arrive in the middle of the viral explosion, you won't be the only one who wants to download. Peers will upload to each other, not just you. So, unless one of the peers happen to be a big fat server with monstrous upload, you won't download the video much faster than the median upload rate. The idea of using your uplink to the fullest sounds good, but to do that, you need to acquire some content in the first place. And that requires the upload bandwidth of other peers…