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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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.