Wow! This may lower the entry barrier for a new movie/TV streaming company. They can lower their costs by offsetting the bandwidth to users. Legal torrent streaming might have just got the boost it requires.
Spotify already did that early on - the client was also a P2P node that would transfer music files from and to other clients. They shut that part down last year.
When I looked into it a few years ago, Spotify used a custom protocol which was similar to BitTorrent but was not actually using BitTorrent. It had some clever features to optimize for the chunk of the song to be played and it had encryption for the DRM.
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Wow! This may lower the entry barrier for a new movie/TV streaming company. They can lower their costs by offsetting the bandwidth to users. Legal torrent streaming might have just got the boost it requires.
This isn't a new feature, it was available at least in 2012, possibly earlier.
It seems HN is being trolled by posts from the past.
I read about it in 2010.
I used it in '08-09.
Spotify already did that early on - the client was also a P2P node that would transfer music files from and to other clients. They shut that part down last year.
When I looked into it a few years ago, Spotify used a custom protocol which was similar to BitTorrent but was not actually using BitTorrent. It had some clever features to optimize for the chunk of the song to be played and it had encryption for the DRM.
I think BBC iPlayer used BitTorrent (or some other form of P2P) when it first launched.