You could have local caches of the users recently watched videos on their machines as available seeds. bittorrent now also supports http based init seeds so you could create torrents with a verified sha of a youtube mp4 downloaded once or something like that.
if someone is seeding that video cause they recently watched it and it remains on their local cache, you could get the bits from there vs hitting youtube servers
That works if you fix everything to a single quality and codec. YouTube videos tend to have something like 20+ variants that can get dynamically switched between while the video is playing (adaptive streaming).
The client can pick the optimal encoding and quality which makes that quite a bit more difficult. A user on a modern device that can hardware decode HDR av1 will have a file cached completely useless to a browser that can only do SDR h264.
I think there is a sort of network effect needed to make it become reasonable.
You could have local caches of the users recently watched videos on their machines as available seeds. bittorrent now also supports http based init seeds so you could create torrents with a verified sha of a youtube mp4 downloaded once or something like that.
if someone is seeding that video cause they recently watched it and it remains on their local cache, you could get the bits from there vs hitting youtube servers
That works if you fix everything to a single quality and codec. YouTube videos tend to have something like 20+ variants that can get dynamically switched between while the video is playing (adaptive streaming).
The client can pick the optimal encoding and quality which makes that quite a bit more difficult. A user on a modern device that can hardware decode HDR av1 will have a file cached completely useless to a browser that can only do SDR h264.
I think there is a sort of network effect needed to make it become reasonable.