Slapvid: Peer to Peer Video in Your Browser
Nick Gonzalez
16 comments »
Video on the web is a killer app, but it’s also a bandwidth hog. Forbes estimated that content distribution networks like Akami or Limelight can charge distributors around a cent per minute, while larger distributors can get deals at around a half or tenth of a cent. Last year it was estimated that Youtube was spending over $1 million a month to stream more than 100 million videos a day. In response, video distributors looking to give higher quality video on the cheap are pushing the burden of bandwidth to users through peer to peer networking. So far this has widely focused around larger desktop players (Veoh, Joost, Babelgum). Video player startup Slapvid wants to do peer to peer in your browser.
Slapvid runs as a Java applet coupled with a Flash video player. Unfortunately this means users have to authorize the 300Kb applet to run the first time, but that still requires less initiative on the users behalf than a full blown browser plugin. The applet runs in the background, managing the delivery of video chunks to be displayed in the player.
When you first start a video, the player connects directly to their central video server to download enough of the beginning of the video as a buffer while the peer to peer kicks in. During this request, their server also sends you back a list of 3 to 5 peers playing the same video. The applet then seeks out peers further along in the video, getting sent bits of the video in 64KB chunks. If you don’t hear back from the peers, the video just streams from the central server.
To demonstrate the peering technology, they’ve developed their own flash player that shows the top Youtube videos in 5 minutes. The player mashes together short clips of each video. You can see the whole video by clicking the hand. However, because of bandwidth concerns on their central server, the peering technology is only turned on for a small sample of users. All other users will just see videos streamed from Youtube. To guarantee you get the peering applet, you can apply for one of 100 beta accounts for Techcrunch readers. You can see the video player after the jump.
Slapvid is a Y Combinator startup from 4 Carnegie Mellon grads.
It’s great that they’re saving bandwidth, but what can they do for the end user? To me, this is just another video site. Great, they put together YouTube’s top 25 into a quick strip, but YouTube’s top 25 are usually not the videos most people want to watch. Am I missing something here?
Also, the design/UI is really weak. I read more about the P2P technology - it decreases download time, cool. I’m still not impressed at all.
yeah I never watch the top 25 on youtube ..
mostly music videos / 1-3 times a week for a total of maybe 2 hours
- if music videos went form YT - I might visit once a month for a 15 minute period
- I think 5% of YT - are jus tlike me
Way to go dude!!! Congrats for the app, I know that’s jut the beginning.
To a end user it loads faster, to the provider it cuts down the bandwidth, that is enough to say they have something really interesting.
Oh I see — the flash widget thing exists to TEST their P2P in the browser. I think it’s pretty cool, I would imagine it must be a tough chicken and the egg problem. Small video sites don’t want to use you (don’t want to lose viewers), big sites don’t want to use you (no track record).
All in all, I think using the top 25 to test their P2P is a cool vertical.
Cheers guys!
Phew, I have Java disabled for both F and IE …
They need to crack the live multicast p2p market in a browser and they might be onto somthing and then they can Partner with thier YCombinator friends Justin.tv
can someone explain to me what the benefit of this would be for anything but copyrighted material (network television shows and movies). I can see that as always being a big hit and with P2P I could just stream my whole ORB library to the world.
Fortunately (at least if you own the original content) that’s not very practical right now because if more than about 4 people were streaming simultaneously, upstream bandwidth is shot and my CPU will be taxed.
Mr. Arrington, are you viewing this as the “Napster of Video streaming”?
and Mr. Gonzales too for that matter…
It really looks like a proof of concept now. Granted, peer to peer works better for people watching fewer and longer length content, but Youtube is a widely available library of content to test on.
well my son, this is quite possibly the most astou…
I have looked into various ways of doing this and it seems that a neat way may be to do it in Silverlight, although that framework hasn’t got good distribution yet.
The one problem with P2P in the browser is that you don’t have persistent peers, like you do do with desktop P2P. If you look at even the most popular videos on YouTube, on some there are only 4 or 5 people watching at any one time. To get around this and be really smart, you would have a persistent cache in the browser that would be able to serve any video you have ever seen. Again, there is nothing in it for the user so this has to be as transparent and as easy to use as possible
It would also be a mistake for them to try and build their own destination, the smart way would be to license the technology to other video publishers
I think P2P works ok from a delivery perspective as long there are sufficient peers out there with fragments of the media files YOU want to download/view. If the pool of peers with fragments for a media file is sufficiently low then the origin servers still take the bulk of the traffic and then your back in the paying transit cost scenario for moving the files from your origin servers out to the requester.
Our company works on the same concept to make evrybody able to watch DVD-quality videos inside their browser.
We did a real good case for French Tennis Open, take a look: http://www.fft.fr/action/one-click/videocast.asp
I am not sure Java pplet is the best soltuion, we are using Active X for IE and FF.
http://www.1-click.com
This is a pretty good idea as far as video de-centralization and ensuring video quality, but a pretty competitive market right now.