That’s not how this would have to work though. Even with dedicated seeding instances, the instantiation of a session for a torrent is LONG. Like 5s+ long. A request and response from a CDN is in the milliseconds. Users wouldn’t use a system that takes 5s just for the initial request for a single video, plus the additional time to sort for segments and recombining before it plays. Even in a fast-ish scenario, that’s like 10s alone.
Imagine waiting 10s for a stupid internet video to even start playing to watch some kid dance with a rubber chicken in their pants.
It will scale just fine, so long as the ratio of instances:users is similar.
The current ratio of consumers:creators on youtube is 41:1, by my research. A single server of sufficient power could easily serve thousands of users.
That’s not how this would have to work though. Even with dedicated seeding instances, the instantiation of a session for a torrent is LONG. Like 5s+ long. A request and response from a CDN is in the milliseconds. Users wouldn’t use a system that takes 5s just for the initial request for a single video, plus the additional time to sort for segments and recombining before it plays. Even in a fast-ish scenario, that’s like 10s alone.
Imagine waiting 10s for a stupid internet video to even start playing to watch some kid dance with a rubber chicken in their pants.
That’s weird because it works instantly for me.