Apparatus and method for peer-to-peer streaming

An apparatus for collecting streaming content from over the Internet, comprising:

• a network-enabled computer device configured for communicating with a plurality of other network-enabled computer devices over the Internet;
• programming executable on said network-enabled computer device for,
• determining the availability of a given streaming content element within the plurality of other network-enabled computer devices,
• wherein said given streaming content element is retained within the other network-enabled computer devices as a plurality of segments, each of which contains a plurality of data packets and a segment identifier,
• requesting said segments of the given streaming content element from selected network-enabled computer devices within the plurality of network-enabled computer devices based on estimated and/or measured transmission performance of the network-enabled computer devices,
• establishing real-time connectivity with the selected network-enabled computer devices from which are collected the packets within each of said segments of the given streaming content element, and
• preparing and ordering the collected packets and segments into a non-segmented streaming output of said given streaming content element.

A method of communicating streaming content through the Internet, comprising:

• storing a given streaming content element within a plurality of network-enabled computer devices configured for communicating over the Internet;
• wherein said given streaming element is retained within the network-enabled computer devices as a plurality of segments, each of which contains a plurality of data packets and a segment identifier;
• determining the availability of the given streaming element within the plurality of network-enabled computer devices;
• requesting said segments of the given content element from selected network-enabled computer devices within the plurality of network-enabled computer devices in response to estimated and/or measured service latency of the network-enabled computer devices;
• establishing real-time connectivity with the selected network-enabled computer devices from which are collected the packets within each of said segments of the given content element;
• and
• preparing and ordering the collected packets and segments into a streaming output of said given content element.