There is peertube and webtorrent, but they does not seem to catch the mainstream users.
In my opinion, NAT and the extensive tracking that has led users to distrust sharing their IP addresses are the reasons why it hasn't caught on.
Imagine YouTube using P2P technology, it would save lot of money spent on caching servers.
Peertube and web torrent aren't doing live streams as far as i know, just stream of pre-recorded video, which is still a lot harder for p2p than random order download, but not in the same ballpark as a livestream.
> Imagine YouTube using P2P technology, it would save lot of money spent on caching servers.
I think its money well spent.
Peertube supports live streams https://framablog.org/2021/01/07/peertube-v3-its-a-live-a-li...
There is a lag between the source and the audience, maybe it's been improved in the last 4 years though, not sure.
Hmm interesting i didn't know that.
I couldn't find much docs on how it works, just https://docs.joinpeertube.org/contribute/architecture#live
Sounds like they break the stream into very small segments and publish each of those with bit torrent (?), they seem to claim about 30 second delay and scale in the hundreds but not thousands. Certainly impressive if true, i wouldnt of thought such an approach would scale so well. Of course its still a far cry from twitch, but nonetheless impressive.
You can find more information in this article presenting results from a stress test: https://joinpeertube.org/news/stress-test-2023
Its probably not that realistic a test if all peers are on the same local network.