Rodi

Thanks man! WebRTC P2P is the future of streaming :)

cool to see non tech stuff here sometimes

Hey, founder of the p2p service described in the article here (www.streamroot.io)

This is exactly what we are doing :) We have have a hybrid p2p model that fetches video segments from others peers as long as it can, and switches back to CDN on urgency cases. And our tracker uses geoIp data, ISP and some network topology elements to connect the best candidates together

Hey, what you describe what clearly the case with old peer-to-peer systems, but things changed a lot. With webRTC and ICE/STUN, the p2p connection takes less than 5s on average and goes through NATs in 95% of the cases. As for the bandwidht issues, it is not a problem as the solution is hybrid and doen't need every peer to be a full seeder.

If you don't beleive me you can always try by yourself, with a Chrome/Firefox/Opera browser : http://demo.streamroot.io

Networks interruptions happen a lot, this is why our system is hybrid: if you didn't have time to get the segment from the peer-to-peer, you dynamically switch back to the CDN to get the missing parts of your video segments, so in practice the quality can't be worse than what you have with the CDN only.

The main difference with the solution the article describes and Popcorn time is that the former can be used by the online broadcaster for their own videos and integrates seamlessly in their webpage, whereas for Popcorn time you need to install the soft, and can only download torrents.

Hey,

I am the founder of the company providing the pluginless peer-to-peer video streaming service the article is talking about (www.streamroot.io).

>-- residential/mobile internet service has asymmetric upload/download speeds.

Indeed, but it is not so much of an issue: 1. the average video stream bitrate today is 1.5 Mbps, which is closer to the upstream limits than the downstream limits. 2. Our solution is hybrid, so if you can't get all the data from other peers, you just get the rest from the CDN, so even if someone has a 100 kbps uplink, he still contributes to the swarm. 3. With fiber there are more and more people having 100+ Mbps uplink, and these people can serve dozens of others peers, and this balances the asymmetry partially.

>-- ISPs are suspicious of heavy uploads originating from residential homes and could be flagged as "servers" in violation of ISP's TOS or reclassified as "business" thereby increasing the billing amount.

This must be different depending your country and ISP, but the upside comparing to some full P2P service like Bittorent is that you share video segments only while you are on the streamer webpage (as soon as you close your tab the p2p stops), and also all the communications are encrypted with DTLS provided by WebRTC, so it is not so easy for ISPs to figure out what is exchanged. And finally, we actually help the ISPs by connecting the peers that use the same ISPs, and are on the same sub-networks first, so they have less peering issues.

>-- too much latency for live mega events (World Cup, etc) because of asymmetry mentioned above. (Your neighbor tweets that Spain scored the winning goal before your P2P stream received the last packets showing that it happened.) Latency for bittorrent is ok, but for live megaevents, no.

I think that this where our technology really differentiates with the old peer-to-peer systems : we don't add any additional latency to the stream, but just use the latency already generated by HTTP streaming protocols like HLS or MPEG-DASH. So with or without our system, you will still have a 20-30 seconds latency with the encoder, as it is already the case with all the professional live streams like the ones used during Superbowl or the World Cup.

As for CDNs cooperating to broadcast a live stream, it is not really the spirit of the CDN market right now, instead what happens is that the Broadcaster can contract one or several backup CDNs for their biggest events, and use them in case the primary CDNs breaks down. This is what happened for the Superbowl stream : NBC had Akamai as their primary CDN, and Level3 as a backup. In the end they didn't have to use the backup, but still paid both CDNs for the event !

Streamroot | Fulltime | Paris | pluginless Peer to Peer assisted video streaming technology. www.streamroot.io

We are a French startup planning to revolutionize the world of online video delivery. We have participated in Le Camping Paris and Techstars Boston accelerating programs, and are growing very quickly !

Our Stack : JavaScript. NodeJS, Redis, Mongo, WebRTC

We are looking for : - an experimented Scalability Engineer who will help us scale our trackers to sustain millions of concurrent connections. - A Media Player engineer to build and adapt our p2p module to all the major web video players, on desktop, set top boxes and mobile.

More details on the postions here : http://www.streamroot.io/jobs#dev1