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0 pointspquerna9y ago0 comments

I used to work at Joost. Culturally, it came fro the Skype world, and I worked on the p2p engine used for both on-demand and live streaming of video:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joost

The cost of delivering content is not zero. The main variables are the codecs & quality of a stream, which on average is going up, and the cost to deliver (bandwidth/storage). The cost deliver keeps going down.

So, there are periods of time, when a p2p approach "looks" nice. 4k? Maybe all this live-streaming stuff? Sure. But what happens is the cost of delivery with HTTP keeps going down.

Joost had a bunch of other issues that made it fail, un-related to the use of p2p.

p2p might be cheaper to operate for a business, but it has almost no advantages for users over a well built CDN. For users it only has negative attributes (baring a few situations on LANs / getting streams into places you can't put a CDN).

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whadar9y ago· 2 in thread

Prices do go down, but consumption goes up in a faster pace. So overall companies pay more for CDNs for video :)

The thing is, even if CDNs would be free, they have limited capacity and they saturate during large live events. That's one of the reasons we still watch sports on pay-tv.

WhitneyLand9y ago

>Prices do go down, but consumption goes up in a faster pace

Not true. It varies based on what's in vogue on the content side, quality requirements, and the state of technology at a given moment in time.

As one point of reference, Flickr posted an analysis here recently that discussed how their architecture has evolved over time based on variable ratios of usage requirements and hardware costs.

shacharz9y ago

I can't speak to Flickr's use-case specifically, but generally speaking the content delivery market is growing.

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