The Big Movie Chain Project - Torrents vs IPFS
In my last installment of "The Big Movie Chain" I started to address the technological design of "The Big Movie Chain". In it I stated the use of Torrents as the underlying streaming technology for "The Big Movie Chain". @arkstrikle brought up the concerns of many in the use of torrents, namely the illegality that surrounds the wild wild west of torrents.
It is true, the file transfer of choice for internet piracy is often Torrents, and has been since the early to mid 2000's. BitTorrent the company has received several licences to Hollywood films, twitter and facebook both use torrents to update server software. While torrents have been associated with piracy, the technology has matured to a point where main stream commercial applications are possible.
The main competitor at this point with torrents is IPFS. IPFS would be an appropriate choice, if versioning of the video content was necessary. Additionally, there is not a well established ecosystem of software libraries to use for IPFS, just a few solid reference libraries. The other problem I see with IPFS is if Steem users are not running a IPFS node, the convenience factors of IPFS are not truly available, whereas streaming webtorrents can be achieved using the active user base of Steem user's webbrowser and amazon S3 as seeding storage.
In every technology project being built from the ground up, you have to sit down and look at all the solutions available, and reduce the possible solutions down to the most stable, easy and convenient implement. That said, nobody pays for providing a solution to an easy problem unless its a wordpress installation (which is complex for sustainability reasons).
I could be very wrong in this analysis. I have no in-depth experience in streaming webtorrents or IPFS but surveying the interweb writeups available as well as visiting the IPFS project from the days of the first public release, these are the issues I see at present.
The Big Movie Chain Project:
huh?
It was meant to be a light technical summary, defending using torrents over ipfs, since torrents as a format is for p2p online data consumption and ipfs is a format for p2p/federated versioned data.
Having just (metaphorically) signed up on D.Tube, I was initially very excited about IPFS because I believed that D.Tube would serve the videos through it, and contrary to my expectations, watching videos on this competitor of YouTube is actually just as fluent as on YouTube itself.
It was therefore quite disappointing when I tried watching one of my videos via a local IPFS gateway: it's slow as hell and totally impractical. But, how could this be if watching the videos from D.Tube was fluent? The disappointing solution to this paradox is that D.Tube doesn't actually use IPFS to stream videos, despite the prominent mention of it on its homepage. Granted, when you upload a video it still gets uploaded to IPFS, but the streaming happens from D.Tubes internal server farm, at least if I understood this article correctly: https://nannal.com/dtube-past-present/
So yeah, IPFS is no replacement for BitTorrent. Not even close.