   Bittorrent for streaming video
  Hey, I know it's not a game, but has anyone considered combining a bittorrent-like protocol with a streaming video website? It would be a streaming video website with unlimited bandwidth! (You would download from other users that had seen more of the video than you)   
  The problem I see with that is with BT you are downloading different 'sections' of a file from different locations. For a streaming video you need your data to come in a sequential stream for the video to play back properly.You don't really want to watch the start of a video, then a bit of the middle, then a bit after the start, then the end, then whatever's left, do you? ;)   ;  To get around that you could just connect to one peer that has more of the file than you. Since they're downloading sequentially, you can leech their upload speed to enhance your download speed freely. Since most connections have more down than up, it should work pretty good. You could safely download from any user that has "more" of the file than you, and upload to any user with "less"...but you'd have to stick to one user to ensure that the file is sent sequentially...;  The problem with BitTorrent is, you cannot simply download from peers that have the next sequential pieces. This is because of the tit-for-that algorithm. In short, a peer mainly uploads to other peers from which it recently received something.With streaming, you might occasionally be able to download from a peer that has the next sequential piece (optimistic unchoke mechanism), but since you don't have any interesting to share with that peer, that peer won't reciprocate in the near future.Developers of Tribler are trying to solve this problem by introducing a different algorithm, give-to-get. Basically, Tribler peers gossip around about other Tribler peers about who is a leecher and who's a nice uploader.   ;  There already exists such a program. It's called Joost (I use it). It uses a P2P Bittorrent like system to stream video to your PC as TV on demand. It will start playing the file within a few seconds of you selecting it. Occasionally it will stutter, but all I've had to so on these rare occasions is to pause it for a few seconds and then it worked fine.IF you leave the downloader part of the program running it will continue to download and share the videos with other users, or you can turn that off when you exit the main program.   ;  There is already Vuze. Technically, it's not streaming though..   ;  I recently received word from the Tribler developers that they managed to get the give-to-get algorithm and streaming working, so we can expect this feature soon in future Tribler versions.