And that is simply touching the easiest problem to solve which is the storage part. Serving the video fast with adaptive quality and having the available bandwidth close to the user is another much larger problem.
Since filming, editing, and streaming videos already consumes users' storage and bandwidth resources anyway, the total amount of resources available to a P2P torrent-style network clearly is already in the ballpark of what's needed for YouTube.
> Serving the video fast with adaptive quality and having the available bandwidth close to the user is another much larger problem.
No idea how well it works in practice, but in theory PeerTube has already solved this using WebTorrent.
The nice thing about P2P is that your network's capacity scales organically with load. More users⇒More capacity.
I doubt it because a lot of this content doesn't exist outside of Youtube and because the content does exist on external drives has not internet connectivity or capacity to get it.
> No idea how well it works in practice, but in theory PeerTube has already solved this using WebTorrent.
It seems to currently have 220K users, not exactly what I would call representative or a success for that matter.
> The nice thing about P2P is that your network's capacity scales organically with load. More users⇒More capacity.
Only if they agree to themselves share the content they host which is not necessarily the case.
The Pirate Bay existed… huh, still exists, OK… without requiring any single person to have all the pirated content on any single system — the combined size of all videos on YouTube may be 10 to 15 exabytes or whatever, but no single video, no single creator, is close to that. Even LTT is about 3.6 petabytes for their entire working-archive backup system last I heard, and if they wanted to stream those as a torrent, well, the files are right there.
It may not suit the current way YouTube content is consumed, where you share a link to a specific timestamp and whoever follows that link can see that moment almost immediately, but that doesn't detract from "can people share videos, perhaps even ones they made themselves, using this system?"
