I don't know about other countries, but in China, almost all major video hosting companies (including both PGC and UGC contents) are using P2P technologies to save bandwidth.
Live streaming p2p is the easy one. Live streaming content is very skewed: top 1% streams can cover majority of the bandwidth, the top room can easily have tens of thousands of users, so p2p helps a lot.
Video-on-demand is harder. But now there's also many "seed boxes" out in the market: it's basically a custom home router with a big disk, users buy it and put it in their home as a regular wireless router, but in the background it would automatically connect to server, cache videos and serve the videos to other peers. The user may get some bonus from it (mostly digital points). Essentially, these companies are buying users' home internet as CDN edge nodes.
But in either way, P2P is used to save some bandwidth (cost), but the performance would almost always be worse. There would always be traditional CDN as a fallback.
Some possible reasons why it's more popular in china: 1. there's lots of people here; 2. users don't care about their privacy much
(I worked on this area in one of the largest video hosting company in china)
I'll add 3. connections tend to be symmetric, and even guaranteed for fixed connections (well technically mobile internet are asymmetric by design, but it doesn't matter much because uplink is still reasonably fast) and 4. government-mandated peerings, before 2017 it'll be simply impossible because Telecom and Unicom (not sure about Mobile) don't have good peering back then with each other.
Where I live in the US we have ADSL and to make peer-to-peer viable at all I have to put an upload cap on, otherwise the uplink gets saturated and downloads start having problems because the ACK packets get delayed or lost.
It drives me absolutely up the wall that some torrent networks insist that you have a 1-1 ratio because it is close to impossible for me and there is no point because often the network has so many seeds…. The fact that I can complete a transfer uploading just 5% of what I download proves my upload isn’t needed.
some torrent networks insist that you have a 1-1 ratio
Yeah, it sucks. Ratio economies disproportionately favor users with good links. At the same time, it ignores the truly valuable user contribution which is decentralized redundant storage. Trackers should be trying to maximize the amount of copies available in the swarm, not bandwidth which literally doesn't matter past a certain point. What good is a torrent with zero seeds?
You should look into enabling fq_codel/cake or similar algorithms on your router if you have bufferbloat issues. You can also rent a cheap seedbox with a symmetrical connection if you are having issues seeding. Also in my experience most of the best trackers have a bonus point system that rewards long term seeding over ratio. BTN for example is completely ratioless.
Funnily, all Comcast-provided (look who sponsors bufferbloat.net :P) and majority of Xyzel routers implement CoDel already. It's just that even with CoDel, it just sucks.
There are several companies doing this business specifically: users buy seek boxes from them, and they sell the bandwidth to us video streaming companies. They are just like CDN providers, but instead of buying bandwidth and server from the data center, they “buy” it from home users. I don’t think ISPs would like this, because it affects the business in their data center side.
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I don't know about other countries, but in China, almost all major video hosting companies (including both PGC and UGC contents) are using P2P technologies to save bandwidth.
Live streaming p2p is the easy one. Live streaming content is very skewed: top 1% streams can cover majority of the bandwidth, the top room can easily have tens of thousands of users, so p2p helps a lot.
Video-on-demand is harder. But now there's also many "seed boxes" out in the market: it's basically a custom home router with a big disk, users buy it and put it in their home as a regular wireless router, but in the background it would automatically connect to server, cache videos and serve the videos to other peers. The user may get some bonus from it (mostly digital points). Essentially, these companies are buying users' home internet as CDN edge nodes.
But in either way, P2P is used to save some bandwidth (cost), but the performance would almost always be worse. There would always be traditional CDN as a fallback.
Some possible reasons why it's more popular in china: 1. there's lots of people here; 2. users don't care about their privacy much
(I worked on this area in one of the largest video hosting company in china)
I'll add 3. connections tend to be symmetric, and even guaranteed for fixed connections (well technically mobile internet are asymmetric by design, but it doesn't matter much because uplink is still reasonably fast) and 4. government-mandated peerings, before 2017 it'll be simply impossible because Telecom and Unicom (not sure about Mobile) don't have good peering back then with each other.
Where I live in the US we have ADSL and to make peer-to-peer viable at all I have to put an upload cap on, otherwise the uplink gets saturated and downloads start having problems because the ACK packets get delayed or lost.
It drives me absolutely up the wall that some torrent networks insist that you have a 1-1 ratio because it is close to impossible for me and there is no point because often the network has so many seeds…. The fact that I can complete a transfer uploading just 5% of what I download proves my upload isn’t needed.
Yeah, it sucks. Ratio economies disproportionately favor users with good links. At the same time, it ignores the truly valuable user contribution which is decentralized redundant storage. Trackers should be trying to maximize the amount of copies available in the swarm, not bandwidth which literally doesn't matter past a certain point. What good is a torrent with zero seeds?
You should look into enabling fq_codel/cake or similar algorithms on your router if you have bufferbloat issues. You can also rent a cheap seedbox with a symmetrical connection if you are having issues seeding. Also in my experience most of the best trackers have a bonus point system that rewards long term seeding over ratio. BTN for example is completely ratioless.
Funnily, all Comcast-provided (look who sponsors bufferbloat.net :P) and majority of Xyzel routers implement CoDel already. It's just that even with CoDel, it just sucks.
That's fascinating. How popular are seed boxes? And does the consumer get them from their internet provider directly?
There are several companies doing this business specifically: users buy seek boxes from them, and they sell the bandwidth to us video streaming companies. They are just like CDN providers, but instead of buying bandwidth and server from the data center, they “buy” it from home users. I don’t think ISPs would like this, because it affects the business in their data center side.
IIRC the total usable bandwidth is about 10Tbps