profile for Gajendra D Ambi on Stack Exchange, a network of free, community-driven Q&A sites

Wednesday, August 14, 2024

Mushrooming streaming services and a solution

Which streaming services are you using? The big 5? What about some of those titles, shows, movies which are not on those subscription services? Do you have to upgrade to the max tier to get the full quality streaming or no? Are you sharing your logins with others? so that 5 of you can buy 1 services each and share with each other?

Sooner or later it will be a headache for consumers and they would rather use illegal downloads than subscribe to a streaming service only to get a delayed or degraded service. I am in india, many of the shows that I like are not available immediately in my country. When they are available, they are available in a degraded 720p [half HD] quality in an ugly rectangle box at the center of the screen. These streaming services many a times won't play in full resolution if the cable or the monitor or the graphics card that you have on your PC are not compatible or not the right ones (If you are watching on a laptop or PC). If you are using a television, many a times, many have faced a problem of not being able to watch it in a quality for which they have paid for, because the cable or the TV is not compatible. There are many artists, small indie movies struggle to put their movies on the streaming platforms because if they dont place it on the top streaming platforms, it is almost as good as invisible. Artists also end up losing a lot of money, sometimes streaming platforms overvalue a content and end up overbidding for some content. Solution?!

It is a very old solution. torrenting. yes. p2p. most of the cost of these OTT (streaming services) is the infrastructure. Each of these studios or group of artists can have a their own private torrent tracker. An opensource p2p client for the user. This client can subscribe to or add as many torrent sources as it wants. netflix/disney/hbo/prime torrent trackers and/or more. Let the user have a pay as you go model for this p2p client streaming app, charged per hour. Then let 99% of the money collected will be distributed amongst the torrent sources based on the number of hours or minutes their torrent tracker was used. Users can also get a discount if they let the p2p client use the user's network/storage for caching. Depending on what % of outgoing traffic the user's p2p client has contributed against what it has consumed, some discount can be given to the user. More people use this p2p client, less burden or work or load on the original content owner or creator.

This will definitely be cheaper, easier than illegal download or illegal torrenting. Today most users subscribe to 1 or 2 platforms, pirate the rest of the content from other platforms to which they haven't subscribed.

This p2p client has to be opensource, 1% of the user's money can go to it's development and maintenance.