Study of a server-less architecture for video-on-demand applications

Video-on-demand (VoD) systems have traditionally been built around the client-server architecture, where a video server stores compressed video for delivery to clients connected by a network. As the system scales up, the server will need to be upgraded and this can become very expensive when the system scales beyond thousands of users. We investigate a radically different architecture where the bottleneck - video server, is eliminated altogether. Specifically, this server-less architecture relies on the client machines for distributed data storage and delivery. A client initiating a new streaming session will first locate other clients where the requested stream is stored, and then requests delivery of the stream directly from those clients instead of from a central server. This fully distributed architecture is inherently scalable as the storage and delivery capacity grows with the number of clients in the system.