It depends on the size of the swarm or systems consuming the content. For very small swarms, it would be imperative for everyone to contribute, but as the size

It depends on the size of the swarm or systems consuming the content. For very small swarms, it would be imperative for everyone to contribute, but as the size becomes larger it may not be needed. Since a streaming app is deadline aware, which is different from a normal torrent. A normal torrent works on fetching either rarest-first or respond-first chunks, while a streaming app tries to fetch chunks linearly and as soon as possible. It is likely to fetch the same chunk from several places (basing them off RTTs (bandwidth-delay) and availability). Moreover, if popcorn inherits BT's congestion control algorithm (LEDBAT, which is a scavenger algorithm) we might not even see spikes in network traffic. LEDBAT: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6817 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6817