It's not cheap at all if you intend to create a playback experience that is tolerable to users and somewhere close to what they expect and are used to from existing platforms. If your video has even a couple seconds of buffering/rebuffering from failing to do this, you typically can say goodbye immediately to a percentage of views/users in the double digits.

It's free to you if you make a peer to peer model. Honestly my peer to peer streams are more robust and higher quality than Netflix et al, which usually hiccup and drop quality down to 144p while the p2p stream keeps on plucking at 1080p for the entire run time. Maybe it's p2p buffering more at the start, maybe it's maximizing my available bandwidth, but either way, it is a better experience than what the big players offer and can be done by anyone without huge costs associated with CDNs.

If Netflix is having those problems it's more likely your ISP causing them than Netflix or it's distribution model. You've got a sampling bias simply because your ISP isn't screwing with torrents the same way it is with Netflix.

Torrent streaming has a lot of scaling issues that you've just been lucky enough to avoid. A new torrent will have issues with its initial seeding. A new torrent is limited to the seed bandwidth of whatever seeds have the complete file. The initial members of a swarm can't help each other because they're all downloading the file sequentially so can't really share with one another. They only increase seed bandwidth to subsequent participants in a swarm and only so long as they seed the content.

In the traditional BT model swarm participants download blocks out of order so they can share them with peers. So even the initial members of a swarm can share with one another. Streaming requiring blocks be received in sequential order breaks that peer amplification.

With torrent streaming unpopular content and new content can easily stall or just never begin playback. At a small scale torrent streaming is workable but it quickly starts requiring a lot of infrastructure costs. Long tail content on BitTorrent is virtually impossible to find as popularity required for availability.

Couldnt you fake this? A really good spinner/loader experience, or perhaps a preroll prefetched video while buffering. How i remember netflix in the old days, the DA DANG clip seemed to be a preroll clip before the movie.

Any sort of delay or buffering can affect you very negatively (see: https://mux.com/blog/buffering-reduces-video-watch-time-by-4... and https://mux.com/blog/rebuffering-the-most-frustrating-and-fr... )especially now that most YouTube users no longer are used to it.

Sure, you could do something like you mentioned, but doing this for every single video is not likely to go well. But very clever! And helpful, I'm sure. Not a true solution most of the time.

I do very much enjoy the Chrome side-scrolling dinosaur game that appears when I'm offline, but I don't enjoy it more than once every few weeks :)