I wonder if it would be a proper solution to fetch the first X chunks of a video from a blossom server, possibly at a lower quality, and then switch to something else if the user continues on that video instead of swapping again.
I mean, that should give you both low latency withoug giving up on lower distribution costs, just need to work out the complexity cost of such a solution that is.
That's exactly what WebTorrent does by using webseeds. It's providing a redundant source for chunks while maintaining the raw performance of a traditional source.
An array of webseeds in the magnet also allow it to download chunks from disparate CDN's without a load balancer to handle that in the back-end, if one gets rugged your links still *just work*
I think the “near zero latency” is still a valid UX concern.
Do you know if it’s possible to setup a webtorrent library in a way that it is forced to try fetching from HTTP the first couple of chunks and only after a short delay fire up the lookup for seeders?
It's already doing that, there's no round-trip to a tracker required before hitting the webseed directly to get the mov atom and first chunks.
It's just a client that makes use of additional data.
