There's a whole host of reasons why you won't want to ever use P2P if you can avoid it, but there's one in particular I'd like to spotlight: privacy.
P2P is a privacy nightmare, by design. You are asking everyone who wants to watch your video to also host it, which means that everyone watching the video gets to know the IP address of everyone else who watches that video.
Back in the early days of casual online piracy, music companies were happy to be able to sue service operators like Napster and get them shut down. However, when P2P services evolved to distributed-everything, it made it a lot harder to do that[0] since the only thing the service operators did was provide software to connect to their particular swarm protocol.
So they just joined the swarm, downloaded their own music, and then sued anyone who sent it back to them.
Now, imagine all of the copyright claim and takedown fraud that happens on YouTube, except instead of censoring one creator's video, they start suing the people who watched the video. Yeah, no thanks. Centralized video services have many problems, but legal liability on individual users for using the service as intended is not one of them.
Bonus points: given recent GDPR rulings on data exports[1] I would almost surely argue that any P2P swarm violates GDPR, because it turns every viewer of the video into a GDPR data controller, and any US peer in the swarm would constitute a GDPR data export into a privacy-hostile country.
[0] Grokster was sued on an "inducement" theory of liability that SCOTUS pinched from patent law, but that relies on the conduct of how the service operators and software providers advertised themselves to users.
[1] It is illegal to use Google Fonts on an EU website because of the US CLOUD Act and the fact that any subresource provider gets your IP address when you visit a website they service.
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There's a whole host of reasons why you won't want to ever use P2P if you can avoid it, but there's one in particular I'd like to spotlight: privacy.
P2P is a privacy nightmare, by design. You are asking everyone who wants to watch your video to also host it, which means that everyone watching the video gets to know the IP address of everyone else who watches that video.
Back in the early days of casual online piracy, music companies were happy to be able to sue service operators like Napster and get them shut down. However, when P2P services evolved to distributed-everything, it made it a lot harder to do that[0] since the only thing the service operators did was provide software to connect to their particular swarm protocol.
So they just joined the swarm, downloaded their own music, and then sued anyone who sent it back to them.
Now, imagine all of the copyright claim and takedown fraud that happens on YouTube, except instead of censoring one creator's video, they start suing the people who watched the video. Yeah, no thanks. Centralized video services have many problems, but legal liability on individual users for using the service as intended is not one of them.
Bonus points: given recent GDPR rulings on data exports[1] I would almost surely argue that any P2P swarm violates GDPR, because it turns every viewer of the video into a GDPR data controller, and any US peer in the swarm would constitute a GDPR data export into a privacy-hostile country.
[0] Grokster was sued on an "inducement" theory of liability that SCOTUS pinched from patent law, but that relies on the conduct of how the service operators and software providers advertised themselves to users.
[1] It is illegal to use Google Fonts on an EU website because of the US CLOUD Act and the fact that any subresource provider gets your IP address when you visit a website they service.