A few ideas/questions I have. I’ll go through my train of thought.
I wonder if I could upload my movie collection to IPFS. That would be cool. I don’t see why not?
I wonder if Plex could somehow connect to my movie collection on IPFS?
Holy shit, anyone could connect to my movie collection on IPFS!
Comments please. If the torrent universe of movies were stored on IPFS and plex could connect to it that would make IPFS as popular as netflix. Maybe more.
Obviously legal issues regarding pirating but hey the piratebay and has been running for forever and I can’t see that changing. Let’s just assume these video’s are home made movies for this discussion. Or free open source movies or something like that.
You can already do this.
Let me remind you that IPFS can be mounted as a FUSE filesystem. That has been possible for a couple years at least!
When you mount it you can use it like any filesystem. Read that link above for more information.
What you do need to realize is that files you add will only be online as long as “someone” has it pinned. If you add it, you pin it too by default. So if your node stays online (wherever in the world it is), you can access your “home made movies”. Also, so can potentially anyone else… For real home made movies that is probably not what you want but that’s your call
So please don’t see IPFS as a bottomless storage network where you can add files however much you want and it will stay online without you having any nodes hosting it. It simply doesn’t work that way. However, with the recent launch of filecoin you can probably use that It will cost you though.
As for torrents. The same applies there really. The “network” doesn’t host the torrent content. The network only hosts the torrent metadata to find the content (the seeders).So there too, if nobody “hosts” the file it will be inaccessible.