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But does it do it reliably and well? I get nothing but buffering problems, hell I'm rarely even able to get up to speed even to view the stream. Even if I get on, the quality is too variable and skips are abound.

It looks like BT's angle (different from Sopcast) is to break up the large swarms into smaller groupings that are loosely connected to others.

If you have high upload bandwidth (10Mbit or so), Sopcast works great. If you've watched some of Bloodzeed's streams, you know how good it can be - basically flawless HD, delayed by about a minute from the original broadcast.

Unfortunately, Sopcast relies on a centralized service and there was a major crackdown on football streams that started during Euro 2012, and now all the really good ones are gone.

In my experience, competitors like TorrentStream are terrible.

PeerCast[1] was doing it since 2002.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerCast

There was also Joost but that never went anywhere.