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Internet home users-through the diffusion of xDSL connections-represent the potential market of IPTV channels that Content Generators may distribute at reduced costs thanks to Peer To Peer (P2P). This work describes the state of the art of P2P streaming clients and poses some questions about the end-user perspective which is still a non-trivial problem: expectations, content popularity, system's responsiveness and requirements. To this aim, a set of experiments has been performed on a successful P2P system. The new trend seems to investigate flexible solutions in order to get closer to the user's needs and requirements. Unexpected cross-layer optimisations may overcome, like the synergic effect integrating video encoding techniques in a P2P environment. This work is aimed at getting a better comprehension of the issues and metrics that have to be considered in the design of P2P streaming applications.