Ask HN: What are some promising decentralised, P2P streaming protocols?
3 by sph | 0 comments on Hacker News.
The pirate scene for sport event streaming is accessible through: * Ad-ridden, dubious websites with a streaming widget, which have a terrible user experience and are a single point-of-failure (servers get taken down routinely) * Acestream (https://acestream.org/), which is a proprietary streaming protocol on top of BitTorrent, available only via a closed-source, unaudited server. Very shady, but works somewhat decently. * Youtube/Twitch illegal livestreams, which get taken down very quickly yet keep popping up in an eternal game of Whack-a-Mole. Often a vector for the streamer to advertise their shady streaming website. This is terrible, and I am surprised that to this day this is still an unsolved issue for pirates and users alike, and in general anyone that wants to create a decentralised video stream. What are some nascent or niche technologies that can make this a reality? AFAIK BitTorrent is not ideal to build a streaming protocol on top of (IIRC Bittorrent, Inc. announced their own take on the problem, but I guess it went nowhere). acestream apparently has not been reverse engineered by anyone (or Google fails me), so everybody still depend on shady websites exactly like we did in 2010. To be viable, this protocol would have to be: * P2P and decentralised, of course. Anonymous, so it is impossible to know which node is the broadcaster, making it hard to get taken down. * BitTorrent-like, with every peer both downloading and seeding to other peers. * Open, hackable, and well-specified. * Ideally would work in the browser (WebRTC). i.e. doesn't require third-party software if possible. Is there anything out there that satisfies these conditions? Why aren't pirates adopting it, given that this problem is not solved, and P2P livestreaming has huge potential in legal and legitimate avenues as well?