Doesn't the general idea of BitTorrent break down when you try to do streaming?
I don't see any incentive for BitTorrent clients to exchange information here: each client is only interested in the next few seconds of video. Why would they waste bandwidth on transmitting earlier segments to other clients, who have nothing to give in return?
Whenever the windows of two peers overlap there is an opportunity for trade. Perhaps the window size should be inversely related to the number of peers in the swarm.
Wikipedia could have gone very far with video already but instead it took two steps back with a continually crashing java applet.
In terms of the bandwidth costs I don't see why they can't build a cheap CDN to do this. They've already been given a free 10gig port at AMS-IX and I don't see why this can't start connecting (perhaps video only) at more peering points.
I don't see any incentive for BitTorrent clients to exchange information here: each client is only interested in the next few seconds of video. Why would they waste bandwidth on transmitting earlier segments to other clients, who have nothing to give in return?