Decentralized Streaming Service

babadoctor · May 12, 2020

How hard would it be to make a decentralized streaming service like twitch?

I was thinking that users who are closer to each other would share bandwidth and that would potentially lower latency.

Any ideas?

Enderman · May 12, 2020

It's like, very hard...........................

LTT has been working on floatplane for years, with a team of people, who have a lot of experience in programming and content delivery systems and all kinds of stuff.

babadoctor · May 13, 2020

52 minutes ago, Enderman said:

It's like, very hard...........................

LTT has been working on floatplane for years, with a team of people, who have a lot of experience in programming and content delivery systems and all kinds of stuff.

What would be the difficulties?

I can't imagine it's any different than regular torrenting, but with some minor modifications to how peers and seeders are chosen and some fixes to improve latency

Enderman · May 13, 2020

40 minutes ago, babadoctor said:

What would be the difficulties?

I can't imagine it's any different than regular torrenting, but with some minor modifications to how peers and seeders are chosen and some fixes to improve latency

It's the fact that many packets need to be sent out and received in the same order even if they are not going through the same distribution servers, the fact that they need to all arrive in advance in order to avoid buffering, the detection and resending of lost packets, thousands of clients that all need to be sent the stream, etc.

Alex Atkin UK · May 13, 2020

1 hour ago, Enderman said:

It's the fact that many packets need to be sent out and received in the same order even if they are not going through the same distribution servers, the fact that they need to all arrive in advance in order to avoid buffering, the detection and resending of lost packets, thousands of clients that all need to be sent the stream, etc.

Exactly, its like the complete opposite of torrenting where random bits of the file come from different people all over the world and it doesn't matter because its not time sensitive.