LiveBT: Providing video-on-demand streaming service over BitTorrent systems

BitTorrent (BT) is one of the most popular Peer-to-Peer (P2P) protocols for delivering media files in the Internet today. Although BT is quite efficient for sharing and downloading files by using P2P swarming technique, the users have to download almost the whole media file before playing it. This is determined by the Rarest-Block-Download-First strategy of standard BT implementations, which is designed for fast delivery of files in the systems but not for streaming application. In this paper, we present LiveBT a new protocol which supports video-on-demand streaming service and is totally compatible to the current BitTorrent protocol. LiveBT enables users to play hot movies shared in the BT systems smoothly just after 2 similar to 3 minutes of buffering time. We also develop the prototype of LiveBT and test the performance through the real BT download tasks of media files. By comparing our prototype with some popular BT clients claiming to support view-as-download service such as Bitcomet, we find that LiveBT spends a much shorter buffering time to play and achieves quite smooth playback performance.