Recently i saw a video about the costs of a single stream : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSGeEluitKY
I do not understand why in 2024 we dont have a solution (ideally open source and free) so that 1 user can broadcast to the rest of the world, and each peer becomes participant of the broadcast, helping other peers if they have more bandwith than they know what to do with...
We have tech to establish p2p connection between browsers, a simple software on the client side that has awearness of the users internet bandwith could easily help closest ones with traffic. Not only it would be super efficient but it will be almost free or literally free.
Users who watch the exact same stream sounds like something they would not mind helping each other with and improving their experience...
Is there something i do not know that prevents such tech from being developped? maybe incentives?
There is also webtorrent protocol available for browser.
The only guess i have is maybe this is not viable because of the delay? you dont want one user to see it with seconds lag? (though that can be solved with ensuring you dont do too many hops to deliver data...)
This idea is not quite new, p2p-assisted content delivery networks date back to Adobe's RTMFP protocol in the late 2000s. Adobe's original documentation is mostly gone but some IETF slides about the protocol remain (in the stable PDF format!): https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/10mar/slides/tsvarea-1.pdf
Two other examples of this were PeerCDN (acquired by Yahoo in late 2013; feross went on to create WebTorrent) as well as Peer5 which was acquired by Microsoft in 2022. Both use WebRTC under the hood.