You get around that with long buffers. Like...several minutes long, rather than several seconds.
You still have a good chance of buffer underruns when you start a video, but that would likely get mitigated by the fact that the data for the start of the video would likely end up highly duplicated on the network.
The bigger issue is seeking. Jumping to the middle of a video could take many seconds before it played. The UX would be awful.
You get around that with long buffers. Like...several minutes long, rather than several seconds.
That sounds horrible - now you've got to have something buffering [potentially] 100s of MBs (depending on quality) over lousy residential upload speeds?
It would take at least three seeds at Comcastic upload speeds (~10Mbps) to handle a single client at 25Mbps with a small buffer. You'd need a multiple of seeds proportionate to the ratio of stream rate to buffer size. Not ever seeder will have every bit of content, or even every bit of the top 1% of content for a large corpus. Because a large portion of clients will be leechers unable to reseed (mobile, shitty residential routers, etc) the network would need a huge number of seeders with even modest popularity.
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You get around that with long buffers. Like...several minutes long, rather than several seconds.
You still have a good chance of buffer underruns when you start a video, but that would likely get mitigated by the fact that the data for the start of the video would likely end up highly duplicated on the network.
The bigger issue is seeking. Jumping to the middle of a video could take many seconds before it played. The UX would be awful.
That sounds horrible - now you've got to have something buffering [potentially] 100s of MBs (depending on quality) over lousy residential upload speeds?
Netflix in 4K is up to 25 Mbps, which would put a 5 minute buffer at about 1 GB.
That's perfectly reasonable on any desktop/laptop, and likely fine on any decent phone or tablet.
Still doesn't solve the instant seeking problem, of course.
It would take at least three seeds at Comcastic upload speeds (~10Mbps) to handle a single client at 25Mbps with a small buffer. You'd need a multiple of seeds proportionate to the ratio of stream rate to buffer size. Not ever seeder will have every bit of content, or even every bit of the top 1% of content for a large corpus. Because a large portion of clients will be leechers unable to reseed (mobile, shitty residential routers, etc) the network would need a huge number of seeders with even modest popularity.