If Philo Farnsworth, pioneer of electronic television, saw the current landscape, he would recognize a familiar pattern. After his legal battles for his patents, today we would face a different kind of control: that of the big streaming platforms and net neutrality at risk. His legacy suggests a disruptive solution to return power to creators and viewers.
Tele-Foro: A P2P Protocol for Decentralized Streaming 🌐
The proposal, Tele-Foro, would be an open and peer-to-peer protocol. Users would share video fragments from their devices, forming a resilient distribution network. Creators would publish their content with a unique hash, and the audience would retrieve it from multiple nodes. This eliminates central servers, reduces infrastructure costs, and makes censorship or centralized control technically complex.
So you want to be a buffer node for my favorite series 😏
Imagine the conversation: Honey, I can't watch dinner, the bandwidth is dedicated to storing episode 5 of a niche Norwegian series for a user in Helsinki. It's for decentralization, it's our duty! At least domestic disputes would have a nobler purpose than arguing why the subscription price went up again.