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Comment by qwerty456127 | Hacker News Reader

> Try to watch/download a torrent file with small number of seeders and you'll get the experience you will be providing for the end user.

I always wondered why not combine the ways the media is served into a hybrid of P2P with the classic way by just using P2P (e.g. BitTorrent) and also seeding yourself (as the hoster). Just run a seedbox of the capacity you want/can and let the audience help you by handling a share of the load they can. Wouldn't this save you some bandwidth while keeping the same service quality?

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> let the audience help you by handling a share of the load

So why should we help these for-profit corporations? We're supposed to just donate our bandwidth to them? Are we getting a discount in exchange or are they just gonna pocket their bandwidth cost savings at our expense?

Seeding internet archive data is one thing. Letting corporations invisibly take advantage of resources we pay for is a completely different matter.

Pass some of the savings in to the customer via lower prices and it’s a win win.

Alternatively, enabling P2P gives faster downloads. That’s rarely noticeable with streaming but people often want to download stuff for offline viewing.

> Pass some of the savings in to the customer via lower prices

Does that ever happen? They'll probably keep prices exactly the same.

If they have lower costs, some companies will exist that otherwise couldn't. Then you get options that wouldn't exist and more competition drives down prices.

It happens constantly in IT, look at CDN prices per GB over time for example.

It’s only the extreme prevalence of monopolies and free services that confuses the issue.

Archive.org seems to do something like that with its downloads via torrent: it appears as a web-seed for the torrents, and I usually snatch the files from those seeds faster than DHT seeds usually show up (which kinda undermines the idea, though).

Frankly, I never saw any other seeds on Archive's torrents—but one of those I snatched has a ratio of 3 now, so presumably it does work as intended.

Roku can probably provide this service given they control hardware and can provide SDK for the apps to do it.

This is what peertube does. That's why you can watch videos normally despite most not being popular.

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