This busts the myth that the Internet works at the same speed for everyone. The idea that a small mom & pop shop should be able to deliver video just as fast as a major website is simply a nonstarter. Server capacity and caching capacity must be purchased as with anything of value. This is still a ???level playing field??? because the bandwidth and caching capability is available to anyone at the same price for anyone who could pay for it. A level playing field does not mean every content provider ends up with the same speed as some people would suggest and it???s never been that way.
Peer-to-peer is a partial exception because it allows anyone to distribute out-of-order data which can't be viewed or heard until after the entire file is finished. That works great for file distribution or video downloads where people don't care about immediate gratification, but it would never work for high quality in-order on demand content.
There are P2P streaming technologies like TVU but that's limited to the upstream capacity of the typical broadband network and the video streams are very low bit-rate and very low quality. Out-of-order high quality content or in-order low quality content is fine when it???s free (including mostly pirated content), but no commercial content has chosen this free method of distribution. The Olympics were paid for by those Lenovo commercials.
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