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I just can't address this further. I'm not convinced you have the slightest clue what bittorrent is (how on earth does not having 5 9s matter for a consumer connection? If a node drops noone will notice).

I'm not saying there won't be problems. A major problem is the asymmetric nature of many consumer connections. Not only is the upload often a fraction of the download (that is the easy part), but the download speed can be greatly sacrificed if upload is utilized. Add to that issues that home users might want to use the connection for other stuff.

The nightmare and confusion surrounding "I can't game because someone is watching torrent-tube" will be real and add to that issues with ISPs that have a fixed quota or people on mobile (or tethering a mobile connection to laptop). Netflix et al would not like to deal with that kind of FUD spreading around.

And all this is before considering local ISP bottlenecks as it isn't what the network was designed for. A vastly superior option is to put a proxy on the ISP network itself (but yes, hard to do for small players).

Those alone are probably a magnitude worse than the technical issues you speak of. Even spotify got much flak for it, and no, I don't think anyone on earth think the bandwidth requirements of audio and HD video are similar.




I actually did cover that point (albeit at a much higher level) and of course I know what bittorrent is. Just because I don't agree with you it doesn't mean I don't understand the problems. Quite the opposite, I happen to work in the video delivery industry so it's my job to understand these problems.

Like I said, it's ever so easy being an armchair critic but try deploying this stuff at scale with SLAs covering 5 "9s" and paying customers then tell me you've got all the kinks in bittorrent solved ;)


Arguably, no, you contrive issues that don't make any sense. Such as presenting the issue that the end of the file might be downloaded first. Or that you can't have different quality versions and dynamically switch.

The end will only be downloaded if the client requests it, which won't be unless the user is watching the credits...


The client matters though. Even just getting that client onto your end users systems is going to be problematic. And even those bullet point aside I raised other issues you're yet to reconcile. Plus there are other problems I'd not considered (eg RMTP is often sent over UDP and bittorrent is not only TCP but has additional CRC checks that you don't really want with video streaming).

But as you're clearly an expert in video delivery you should build a torrent based video delivery platform. You could make a killing (assun. Or alternatively you might discover these opinions you were dismissing might have had a point and actually video delivery is a lot harder than you first assumed.


Like Popcorn Time?


I know it can be done via bittorrent. Anything can be hacked to do anything if you're motivated enough. However the question asked was whether it's good enough for paying customers in a commercial environment (ie Netflix). That's a very different set of expectations.


Popcorn time when I looked at it has consistently given me performance at least as good as Netflix (which tends to downgrade quality for bad reasons - I have very fast fiber and my ISP has good peering - and has a client that can't seem to stop desyncing audio). The only reason not to use it is arguable legality and the fact that content creators deserve money. It's definitely not quality of service.


If you're on a really fast internet connection where your ISP doesn't throttle P2P (many do in the UK) then I wouldn't be surprised that you'd get good results from Popcorn Time. The issue is whether that is consistently true for people on slower internet connections, connections with QoS or other traffic shaping methods against P2P, and those who stream on lower end hardware (old laptops / phones) or embedded devices (Amazon Firestick or smart TVs).

This is where RMTP streams really shine through - they offer the performance (at the client level) and flexibility (quick swapping between bitrates within 15 seconds of chunked video) to maximize the video quality per client.

As for why Netflix doesn't look to great on your connection, I can only speculate there but the reasons might be more down to congestion on your local Netflix cache server or your ISP itself than RMTP streams being inferior to BitTorrent.


I have a good provider that gives me what I pay for, yes. I understand that many countries have a borderline third-world internet situation, but that has very little to do with the problem you were presenting. What you're talking about here is essentially that Netflix has the lobbying power to make sure that it's services are put above other services in countries vulnerable to that kind of manipulation. I believe that instantly.

I can understand what you're talking about, but I think it's important to appreciate that as an end user I don't really care about what tech words I can tell myself about why things look bad. I care that one thing looks bad and the other does not.


I don't think you understand point. I'm not just talking about "borderline third-world internet" situations. I'm talking about watching stuff on embedded devices, on public WiFi, on older harder or on your cell phone while out and about. I'm also not talking about Netflix's lobbying power.

My point is quite simply that RMTP is already a better protocol for video delivery than BT.

Yes Popcorn Time exist and in some situations it is comparable to Netflix, but not in all situations. In fact not even in most situations.

BT wouldn't allow you to deliver to other providers such as YouTube or Twitch (this is something I was working on last week with RMTP streams). BT wouldn't allow you to dynamically inject ads separate to the video feed (this means you'd need to encode your adverts into the video file so you cannot charge different rates for different days or viewing times - which is a deal breaker for most broadcasters). BT wouldn't work for live feeds (so it would be useless for sporting events - which is what generates a large chunk of broadcasting revenue). BT is noisier than RMTP at the ISP level (ie it actually costs ISP more bandwidth not less - and given how much many ISPs are already complaining about Netflix et al, the last thing you need to is expect those ISPs to offer Netflix free bandwidth in for the form of user seeding).

As you can see the point I was making right from the start isn't that you cannot stream video via BT but rather that there are already better protocols for video delivery than BitTorrent. Hence why professional video delivery platforms don't use BT.

I suspect the issue many commenters on here have is they assume that traditional video delivery is still a classic straight stream of data like the old days and like people are familiar with when downloading via HTTP or FTP. But that's simply not how RMTP works. Modern video feeds are actually chunked just like BT is, except that it's feed from a CDN rather than peered from end users.


Client matters, yes, that hasn't even been brought up in the discussion.

Never stated I was an expert in torrent or broadcasting. But barely one who has used bittorrent can counter most of your arguments. As I've mentioned there are tons of issues (and as mentioned elsewhere in the thread, privacy alone would make it a non-starter for many). I don't believe in it for large scale, but not for the technical issues you presented.

Edit: Apologies if I came off too harsh, been a rough couple of days.


Except you only managed to disprove one point, every other counter argument you gave I was able to offer problems with.

I honestly think privacy is the least of the problems. A bigger issue is just getting content owners on board to begin with

Edit: sorry to read you've had a rough few days. Hope things improve soon


They haven't explicitly 'disproved' all of your points because as mentioned previously most of what you said is nonsense.

(Someone already mentioned this, but seriously - this has been done - it works really well - as a polished commercial product it would probably work even better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popcorn_Time)


I've already addressed Popcorn time several times in this discussion.

The fact that you've acknowledged that it's not as polished as a commercial product should be a big hint that perhaps commercial products choose RMTP over BT for a valid reason. Perhaps even for the reasons you initially dismissed as nonsense. Perhaps you might need to read up a little more about how professional video deployment actually works before you assuming you understand video deployment better than all those engineers who do this shit for a living. Just because something conceptually works it doesn't mean it's any good when dealing with the expectations of paying customers who might want SLAs of 99.999% uptime, low latency live services (like less than 10 seconds), near zero buffering times etc.

The Dunning–Kruger effect is overwhelming in this thread but trust me when I say video engineers are not stupid people and if their lives could be made easier by using BT then we would definitely be seeing commercial uses of BT for video deployment.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effec...


I thought I pretty much disproved every point you made. Here are some further comments but honestly the issues you bring up doesn't make much sense.

> If you have to rely so much in your own data centre

Not sure if we are talking 15 second gifs or full-length films here. The thread started with netflix as an example and that's the context I've assumed. The startup-cost on a full-feature film or even a series episode is barely a fraction in the context so I really don't get your comment here.

But I would go even further and expect constant backing from your data center to help with distribution, depending on how incentivized people are to keep the client alive after they've seen something. I would also not, both for network performance and common decency+courtesy, try to squeeze everything out of my customers internet connections.

> Home connections might drop off due to power cuts, router failure or any of the other numerous conditions that datacenters battle against. Home connections might get throttled by ISPs.

None of that applies here, that's a huge point of bittorrent to be resilient against that so it just doesn't make any sense to bring it up. A datacenter is centralized so it needs to deal with it. Thousands of clients spread throughout the world will likely even have better reliability than a datacenter. All in all, no reliability lost. Throttled by ISPs are a real issue and I really highlighted those issues earlier.

> 2 minutes is an excessively long buffer compared to.how long most RMTP segments are (often 15 seconds or below).

I just made that number up, but yes, a torrent solution will need a larger buffer. That really isn't a problem in this context. What is a much bigger problem is the storage needed for seeding depending on how you want to solve that and how reliant you want to be on your clients (again, your points doesn't make sense, why complain about the buffer when the cache is orders of magnitude worse).

> So then why bother with bittorrent at all?

I wouldn't, and I never said I would. But the protocol would work for it, consumer ISPs and other factors might not for such a large scale operation. And the privacy implications are also bad, it would leak information to your competitors as well. Bandwidth costs clearly aren't that big of a deal either so the potential gain isn't worth it (talking netflix scale here). Also proxys at ISPs are a superior solution.

> A minute isn't even close to acceptable delay[...]

You can not possibly have read what I wrote.

> A bigger issue is just getting content owners on board to begin with

Content owners are notoriously irrational so I wouldn't argue against that. But torrents could still be encrypted.


I suspect some of the issues you're having understanding my comments is I've assumed you had a working knowledge of RMTP.

Basically the protocol comprises of multiple streams of various bit rates. These streams are chunked into blocks of n seconds. This is often around 15 seconds or less. The client will hot swap between each stream if one chunk takes too long or downloads too quick. This ensures that the video quality dynamically scales to the best bitrate your bandwidth will handle and it does so quickly and with minimal buffering. It works for video on demand services but it also works for live feeds as well and the whole thing can be served over multicast or UDP for further savings at either the DC or across the wire.

Bittorrent is nowhere near optimised enough to compete on that level. The 2minute buffering you guessed at would easily look terrible in side by side comparisons with RMTP deliveries. Not to mention a whole boat load of hardware encoders (rack mountable gear used in broadcasters) are built for spitting out RTMP streams yet none (at least that I'm aware of) exist for BT. So you'd have to build your own gear as well as content delivery network. That alone would cost you far more than any savings P2P deployment might earn you.


That is a good point. I still argue you can do the same but with worse results with a torrent solution.

If you have 2 minutes of buffer but realize you can't keep it up you can still switch to a lower bitrate, that will allow you to get any missing chunks and maintain the buffer going forward. So you can still adapt (from the networks point of view much quicker than the 2 minutes), but not nearly as fast and the end result (quality change) might lag quite a bit.


> Never stated I was an expert in torrent or broadcasting. But barely one who has used bittorrent can counter most of your arguments.

The way you discussed this came off as incredibly arrogant, so you shouldn't hold your hands up all of a sudden and claim you're being misrepresented—I personally expected you were a bittorrent developer disgruntled over lack of adoption for non-technical reasons or similar based on the vitriol and self-assuredness.

There is a way to point out that some of those things should not theoretically be a problem without acting like they have no practical merit whatsoever and that anyone who believes so is an idiot. When you cite audio streaming you especially make yourself look like a Dunning-Kruger case as delivering adaptive HD video involves many complex issues that are completely non-existent or trivial for audio. It's hard enough with full control over your own PoPs, and layering on P2P only makes it more complex. Content rights / privacy aside, you could never rely on this as primary delivery for commercial content, so in effect you'd be layering a bittorrent system on top of a traditional CDN setup as a cost saving measure, but you've have to be damn sure QoS didn't degrade in the process which is also non-trivial. Just because it's theoretically possible doesn't mean it's a good idea.


There is a way to point out that some of those things should not theoretically be a problem without acting like they have no practical merit whatsoever and that anyone who believes so is an idiot.

I felt the original message had the same tone and thought to answer with the same. I shouldn't have. And I went further. And I just couldn't stop. I shouldn't be commenting when I'm this frustrated (unrelated to this thread).

Again, I'm sorry.


Nah you're fine. I'm getting serious "ideological/political argument" vibes off the other commenter.

I recognize the other commenters tactics as the same "throw a bunch of dubious claims at the wall, force your opponent to spend way more time refuting each one than it took you to make them, and as soon as they look like they're climbing out move the goalposts again" thing that I see in political arguments with half drunk friends and strangers on political subreddits :P

I'm sure I've seen a great webcomic that describes this somewhere but I can't find it...


Your only point was popcorn time and that stacks up poorly against a good RMTP stream.

The problem we have here is that a bunch of hackers have seen it can be done with BT (which nobody is saying it can't be) and then assuming that BT is suitable for someone like Netflix. If it were that clear cut then we would already be using it. But the fact remains BT doesn't actually stack up that good against already established technologies we use for video streaming.

I'm not saying this for the sake of an "ideological/political argument", this is a well researched point I've discovered doing my professional day job.

It's ever so easy to hack something together that works for a bunch for non-payment customers who just want to pirate something. It's a whole other ball game to build a production service with advertisers (where applicable) and other partners and sell that to paying customers.

What you're doing is comparing a kit car to a bus and saying they're the same because they both transport people. Then assuming the kit car can transport the 40 people at a time for 12 hours a day every day because you've made the previous logical assumption of equivalence.




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