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Why doesn't youtube use p2p or bittorrent?
(lemmy.world)
There's a few reasons.
The biggest reason is that bittorrent doesn't download segments in order. YouTube is a video streaming service, so the video will stop playing after segment 5 if you don't have segment 6, regardless of how many segments you actually have. This is a user experience issue, and it would basically make YouTube unusable for the current use cases.
Peer to peer file sharing, as you might expect, means that other end users are providing the videos, not the company. This means that the company cannot guarantee transfer speed, file completeness, or even that the file is the right file. This may end up causing them some legal trouble in the platform current state.
Peer to peer also means that the videos need to be stored in multiple locations, with multiple copies, and Joe Schmo doesn't have a datacenter in his basement. There will end up being a limit to how much content can be stored, and things that people don't watch simply won't be stored anywhere, so you wouldn't be able to look up that meme video you liked 14 years ago.
It's just not a good way of providing data as a service to a customer. It's an alternative for smaller sites that can't afford, or don't want the paper trail of, appropriate data server sizes.