I think that we are almost there as to technology that can work around the 384 Kbps limit.

If you need 6Mbps to watch HD, then you need about 16 peers sending you 384Kbps each. So, this means, for each movie viewer you need another 16 guys that have watched the same thing, you as a peer would need to:
- Find the peers with the parts of the movie you need
- Coordinate the chunk requests
- Organize the chunks received (probably you won’t receive everything, people will disconnect, so you’ll need to re-request pieces, find more peers, or request from the main server)
- Decompress the video data

doing this you’re probably using a lot of upstream yourself, and CPU.

at the same time, you’re probably a peer.

Where do you get all that bandwidth nowadays unless you pay for the most expensive upstream?

We need ISPs to start giving up more upstream.

I love the idea, and I think its what we need, something like a torrent client optimized for video delivery, with a catalog of 90k movies.

That would certainly kill the DVD (in response to Pogue’s video yesterday)

Think about it, your neighbor watches some HD movie that you want to watch, if he still has it in his hard drive and he has available upload bandwidth why not get part of the HD movie from him? I mention “part” of the HD movie since an HD movie compressed with today’s best technology requires at least 6 Mbps and your neighbor can upload at a maximum of 384 Kbps via ADSL so he can provide you with about 1/16 of the needed content.