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A comment on YouTube to Acquire Videogame-Streaming Service Twitch for $1 Billion?. Parent comment

Re:YouTube to Acquire Videogame-Streaming Service Twitch for... by pooper on Sunday May 18, 2014 @08:18PM (#7765032)
On a back of the napkin calculation, how much outgoing throughput would one need to be able to stream to ten clients directly on say 720p (~30 frames per second)?

I was wondering if it would be possible to create a set up where people can stream from home without any third party in between. Is that even possible for larger audiences?

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Re:YouTube to Acquire Videogame-Streaming Service Twitch for... by keypusher on Sunday May 18, 2014 @09:00PM (#7765155)
Twitch currently accounts for ~1.5% of all U.S. bandwidth.
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Re:YouTube to Acquire Videogame-Streaming Service Twitch for... by pooper on Sunday May 18, 2014 @09:20PM (#7765193)
Slightly off topic but If I remember right, about a question of viability someone at Justin.tv (I guess now twitch) said (this is about four years ago) that playing like a thirty second ad clip can more than cover their operational cost of streaming for an hour. I guess what I wanted to hear from that was that streaming is cheap. Scale probably matters a lot though.
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Re:YouTube to Acquire Videogame-Streaming Service Twitch for... by azth on Sunday May 18, 2014 @09:45PM (#7765246)
Very impressive number. Source?
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Re:YouTube to Acquire Videogame-Streaming Service Twitch for... by keypusher on Monday May 19, 2014 @05:54PM (#7769974)
http://variety.com/2014/digital/news/netflix-youtube-bandwid...
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Re:YouTube to Acquire Videogame-Streaming Service Twitch for... by cjhopman on Sunday May 18, 2014 @11:31PM (#7765559)
I find that incredibly unlikely. Do you have a source?
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Re:YouTube to Acquire Videogame-Streaming Service Twitch for... by kevinwang on Sunday May 18, 2014 @11:51PM (#7765607)
It's mentioned at the bottom of the article, and it links to http://variety.com/2014/digital/news/netflix-youtube-bandwid...
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Re:YouTube to Acquire Videogame-Streaming Service Twitch for... by mikeryan on Sunday May 18, 2014 @10:31PM (#7765369)
You'd want to do something like HLS which can use standard HTTP but not directly to someone's home. You'd need some sort of CDN or cloud intermediary to handle the load.

Or some sort of peer-to-peer Popcorn time style (Bittorrent Live?[1]) that can distribute the load across all viewers.

Hmm... "Twitch-Time" may be an interesting way to resurrect that service.

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/15/5414430/bittorrent-live-mo...

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Re:YouTube to Acquire Videogame-Streaming Service Twitch for... by pferde on Monday May 19, 2014 @05:39AM (#7766558)
Wasn't multicast designed for something like this?
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Re:YouTube to Acquire Videogame-Streaming Service Twitch for... by morenoh149 on Monday May 19, 2014 @05:36PM (#7769884)
I feel like multicast could solve a lot of similar problems. But not every router on the internet plays nicely with it.
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Re:YouTube to Acquire Videogame-Streaming Service Twitch for... by TheLoneWolfling on Monday May 19, 2014 @09:11AM (#7767201)
Peer-to-peer streaming doesn't really work well generally, unfortunately.

It inherently increases latency.

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Re:YouTube to Acquire Videogame-Streaming Service Twitch for... by Corrado on Monday May 19, 2014 @09:42AM (#7767348)
This is the kind of thing that MBONE (Multicast Backbone) [1] was created to handle. Unfortunately, due to security concerns over multicast IP and no dedicated support for multiple parties, it died shortly after being birthed.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbone

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Re:YouTube to Acquire Videogame-Streaming Service Twitch for... by jamesaguilar on Sunday May 18, 2014 @08:33PM (#7765070)
A decent quality 1080p stream is around 2Mbps minimum. Your pipe needs to be able to sustain that times the number of clients.
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Re:YouTube to Acquire Videogame-Streaming Service Twitch for... by pooper on Sunday May 18, 2014 @08:53PM (#7765127)
My thought was to piggyback off of web rtc and other free software projects already available just to learn more about it. I'll be pretty happy to just get it working so two clients can watch a stream. I was already looking to learn something this summer so this should be a nice place to start. Thanks!
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