I was recently wondering about how could one modify an existing peercasting app (= broadcasting using overlay multicast network).
Examples:
http://wiki.tryphon.org/freecast/start
http://www.peercast.org/
What if every peer cached what he's hearing, and what if broadcasted content wasn't live content, but static content? A new peer connects to the bradcasting tree for the wanted file. As he comes into the tree, the tracker, which takes track and organises all the now-hearing-peers tree, redirects him to any leaf user, which logically has already streamed a part of the song he's listening.
The tree per media file would be organised as follow: the seeder/tracker, some backup seeder/trackers, and the tree would be hierarchically sorted, by increasing played-time (equals cached time). The peers which have heard less are always under, and can always find the data upwards.
Seeking would be really harder to implement, and peer departure handling too, but the client functions would be: play, pause, skip.
If you do this for every file in the network (one pseudo-multicast tree per file), and handle the things so that every file always has minimum backup seeds/nodes (in case of node failure), isn't it some pseudo on-demand streaming network?
Is it a viable approach, or is it stupid? :)
Thanks
Florent Thiery
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