This has been tried. The first incarnation of BBC iPlayer was P2P, and I think there may still be a desktop version that allows you to save shows offline for 30 days that works via P2P.
The problem is that in most of the world, consumer internet connections are highly asymmetric, and people have terrible uplinks. Thus there often won't be enough bandwidth available for streaming, and furthermore those providing the bandwidth will find their general browsing experience degraded due to uplink saturation.
Just guessing, but maybe is the natural consequence of asymmetric last-mile internet technologies like (ADSL/cable) where you _must_ allocate separate bands for up/down. This is even true for LTE I think.
This, and most users are just that, users, and not producers, so they value/pay for high download bandwidth and mostly don't care about upload. Upload bandwidth costs money, and not many will pay for it, so we get what we pay for.
This is changing over time as the aggregate upstream load from mostly passive users nevertheless becomes greater than a video upload stream, eg because people are face timing and gaming, etc.. so presumably we'll reach a tipping point where enough people have the excess up to support a growing set of always cached content. İ think this is the long game for distributed fileaystems, eg ipfs
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This has been tried. The first incarnation of BBC iPlayer was P2P, and I think there may still be a desktop version that allows you to save shows offline for 30 days that works via P2P.
The problem is that in most of the world, consumer internet connections are highly asymmetric, and people have terrible uplinks. Thus there often won't be enough bandwidth available for streaming, and furthermore those providing the bandwidth will find their general browsing experience degraded due to uplink saturation.
I am wondering how did we end up with this situation. Is there a TL;DR?
Just guessing, but maybe is the natural consequence of asymmetric last-mile internet technologies like (ADSL/cable) where you _must_ allocate separate bands for up/down. This is even true for LTE I think.
This, and most users are just that, users, and not producers, so they value/pay for high download bandwidth and mostly don't care about upload. Upload bandwidth costs money, and not many will pay for it, so we get what we pay for.
This is changing over time as the aggregate upstream load from mostly passive users nevertheless becomes greater than a video upload stream, eg because people are face timing and gaming, etc.. so presumably we'll reach a tipping point where enough people have the excess up to support a growing set of always cached content. İ think this is the long game for distributed fileaystems, eg ipfs
TL;DR: It was the only way to get broadband downlink speeds over copper telephone lines.