Evolving Swarms with Swarmstreaming

Orasis writes "Applications like Bittorrent have broadly validated swarming technology in the real-world. Now, the inventor of swarming has released a new technology called swarmstreaming that allows smooth progressive playback of content, skipping ahead, and random access without downloading the entire file. It's an HTTP proxy, so browsers, podcasting, and RSS apps should be able to use it transparently. "

Comments

How does this work?

[koreaman]

No amount of swarming will ever get around the fact that a piece of something has to be in your local system before you can view it. "Skipping ahead" Will skip to a part of the clip that you may not have. This=lag. What's more, usually you cannot download one second of movie in one second of time, unless you have a crazy tricked out connection. This means that if you skip to a part you haven't seen yet, you will have to wait even longer for buffering. This is hardly worth it.

Swarming + streaming

[Anonymous Coward]

When you download something via BitTorrent, it's downloaded in random order, as pieces become available. While this works, it means you've got a huge file on your hard disk, but it's completely useless because random pieces are utter garbage bytes. For example, unlike with a straight download, you can't start watching a video file that's still being saved to disk.

The only thing swarmstreaming changes is that it tries to download data in order, so you can use it more quickly, like any other conventional stream-oriented protocol (which is basically anything that uses TCP, along with various streaming media protocols). Now, the innovation is putting together streaming media with the power of swarming--imagine being able to feed a live TV feed from a single stream from the "seed". This is basically what multicast promised, but due to infrastructure problems, has yet to deliver.

Now, the devil is in the details. You're going to have problems with a distributed application that tries to deliver the same data to all nodes in the network at once, since you don't get all those nice properties of randomized distribution of different pieces. Some lossiness would definitely be desirable, meaning you don't really want to use it like a Web proxy. Furthermore, it's physically impossible to deliver data around the planet without many tens or hundreds of milliseconds of latency, so it's not good for interactive applications.

It might be a big win for TV-on-the-Web, though. Imagine if just anyone with a couple hundred kbps could serve a worldwide audience... all those Internet radio stations that are begging for donations to pay bandwidth costs could slash their total bandwidth needs, while upgrading service as well.

I'm not sure if this particular product is going to do the trick (swarmstreaming isn't a new idea, after all, and lots of people have been working on it), but anything that gets people thinking about it should help in the long run.

Re:Something like this

[ScrewMaster]

So what? It's up to the people that are maintaining and improving the infrastructure to give us what we want. You might as well say that, gee, back when people only had 64K of RAM they only used 64K of RAM, and when suddenly machines had 64 MB of memory, why, gosh ... they used that too! Huge surprise. Flat rate isn't the problem, it's the big ISPs milking the infrastructure they have to get the last penny from their users before they invest in upgrading. And upgrade it they will: there's just way too much money to be made in the content distribution business to leave things as they stand.