It still works without any blockchain and there are dockerfiles and images for using it with CLI only on github. It's closed source through and the UI was a forked version of VLC - it's also been suspected to spread malware - CLI tools look fine through but who knows.

Surprisingly the channels that are available work really well if you just use the mpegts stream.

In a past life I've added a few channels to a tvheadend instance on a VPS. It reliable crashed Kodi watching some channels and I've wondered if it's just broken streams or something more interesting is going on.

If you open the ports and watch popular channels it's easily saturating bandwidth - there is no limit.

I've since stopped using it it's the kind of thing that breaks not often enough to be not useless but often enough to be annoying.

It's IPv4 only and seems to use it's own tracker or at least calls to some URLs for initial peer discovery.

Building something similar as true open source would be great but I guess the usecase is mostly illegal streaming.

Be careful - it's attempting to use upnp to open ports on the router and even if just looking through the lists makes you upload fragments.

Still fascinating tool. It's getting to close to what op is looking for but I think it has scalability issues and everything about it is kind of shady and opaque.