<story><title>Bringing Peer-to-Peer Streaming to the World.</title><url>http://swirl-project.org/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>DanBlake</author><text>True P2P streaming is more trouble than its worth. Take it from a guy who streams petabytes a month and has looked into it more times than most.&lt;p&gt;P2P has 2 main advantages, both of which are voided by this implementation:&lt;p&gt;1: Better latency. If Joe talks directly to Sue, that is the fastest connection possible, as opposed to Joe -&amp;gt; Server -&amp;gt; Sue&lt;p&gt;2: The host saves on bandwidth costs&lt;p&gt;Now, point #1 is moot because this needs servers to work for live broadcasts with lots of viewers. Also, even if server were not on the mix, you are still going to need your data relayed several times depending on how far from the source you are. You cannot hype away the fact that if a person is streaming a 1080p video at 1mb&amp;#x2F;s and the average peer has less than 5mb&amp;#x2F;s outbound, that the delay in getting that video to the thousandth viewer is going to be exponential unless you add in servers anyways.&lt;p&gt;Point #2 is mostly moot for 2 reasons. The first reason is the cost of bandwidth is almost dirt cheap now. You can get a unmetered 1gb&amp;#x2F;s line for under $200&amp;#x2F;month. 
The second reason is that when you go full P2P, you lose out on a lot of value adds that people like. Things like transcoding for different sizes &amp;#x2F; mobile as well as DVR style seeking&amp;#x2F;recording.&lt;p&gt;Another reason which I am sure will be hotly contested by the developers is that the quality will be more unreliable than a direct server. Last mile Peers are the worst for sending data. You want to typically be in a hub for direct peering to the various end points (comcast&amp;#x2F;tw&amp;#x2F;etc.)&lt;p&gt;In most cases, Its unfortunately the case that P2P causes exponentially more headaches than it solves.&lt;p&gt;Now, that is not to say that multicast does not have its place in the world. Just that its more of a feature to compliment traditional relay streaming vs being a product on its own.</text></comment>
<story><title>Bringing Peer-to-Peer Streaming to the World.</title><url>http://swirl-project.org/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jsonified</author><text>Hey, I&amp;#x27;m the lead developer of swirl project. I&amp;#x27;d like to add that I wouldn&amp;#x27;t be working on this today without the support of NLNet who has provided a grant that allows me to work on swirl full time atm: &lt;a href=&quot;http://nlnet.nl/project/swirl/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;nlnet.nl&amp;#x2F;project&amp;#x2F;swirl&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;
Huge props.</text></comment>