I don't know about other countries, but in China, almost all major video hosting companies (including both PGC and UGC contents) are using P2P technologies to save bandwidth.
Live streaming p2p is the easy one. Live streaming content is very skewed: top 1% streams can cover majority of the bandwidth, the top room can easily have tens of thousands of users, so p2p helps a lot.
Video-on-demand is harder. But now there's also many "seed boxes" out in the market: it's basically a custom home router with a big disk, users buy it and put it in their home as a regular wireless router, but in the background it would automatically connect to server, cache videos and serve the videos to other peers. The user may get some bonus from it (mostly digital points). Essentially, these companies are buying users' home internet as CDN edge nodes.
But in either way, P2P is used to save some bandwidth (cost), but the performance would almost always be worse. There would always be traditional CDN as a fallback.
Some possible reasons why it's more popular in china: 1. there's lots of people here; 2. users don't care about their privacy much
(I worked on this area in one of the largest video hosting company in china)
Live streaming p2p is the easy one. Live streaming content is very skewed: top 1% streams can cover majority of the bandwidth, the top room can easily have tens of thousands of users, so p2p helps a lot.
Video-on-demand is harder. But now there's also many "seed boxes" out in the market: it's basically a custom home router with a big disk, users buy it and put it in their home as a regular wireless router, but in the background it would automatically connect to server, cache videos and serve the videos to other peers. The user may get some bonus from it (mostly digital points). Essentially, these companies are buying users' home internet as CDN edge nodes.
But in either way, P2P is used to save some bandwidth (cost), but the performance would almost always be worse. There would always be traditional CDN as a fallback.
Some possible reasons why it's more popular in china: 1. there's lots of people here; 2. users don't care about their privacy much
(I worked on this area in one of the largest video hosting company in china)