Wikimedia Trying P2P Video Distribution

bigmammoth writes "One potential problem with campaigns and programs to increase video on Wikimedia sites is that video is many times more costly to distribute than text and images. The P2P-Next consortium has created an HTML5 streaming BitTorrent browser add-on to try and help experiment with ways to reduce the costs of video distribution. As described in a Wikimedia tech blog post, once the SwarmPlayer add-on is installed, and when using the multimedia beta, video on the site will be streamed via the hybrid HTTP / BitTorrent SwarmPlayer. For smooth playback the Swarmplayer downloads high priority pieces over HTTP while getting low priority bits from the BitTorrent swarm. The same technology is available for experimentation with any site via the standalone version of the Kaltura HTML5 Media library."

Great

[CarpetShark]

This is good news. It'll:

a) make it a lot easier to compete with the likes of youtube.
b) be very easy to take advantage of, once integrated into CMS's.
c) make it a lot harder to argue that P2P is only something that pirates use, rather than simply modern technology.

Why not just use Youtube?

[Idimmu Xul]

Why not just use Youtube to host the videos, after archiving them in a Wikimedia store?

Or is this more about control than openness? What value does hosting them at Wikimedia have over Youtube?

Youtube isn't that restrictive as long as you aren't infringing copyright..

Re:Why not just use Youtube?

[DerekLyons]

3) you, and not Google, should get to decide what is "fair use"

Doubly important in the case of Wikipedia - whose "fair use" justification is frequently "we couldn't find an image usable under the normal interpretations of fair use, so we used this one anyhow".

Re:What about unpopular videos

[Anonymous Coward]

This is pretty much the right idea. Say CNN mentions some hot topic, a bunch of wikinerds go update that topic, and the people who don't want to read can watch a video on it. If only one or two people are watching it, no advantage, but if thousands of people are... then the bandwidth isn't hosed in a few seconds.

I wish more software actually worked this way, the "outbound bandwidth" being consumed is not an issue because once you have it, you're not sharing it forever, just for the length of time it takes to download and play it. However it shouldn't replace conventional load balancing. It's primarily to solve "peak load" not "base load" If services start doing this for base load, they're in for a world of hurt, especially since people with mobile devices won't be able to "share" their bandwidth since they get charged thousands of dollars to do so.

Re:What about unpopular videos

[bersl2]

Didn't you read that this is a hybrid system? If there are no seeders, everything will come over HTTP.

Jeez, people really aren't even bothering to read even the summaries now.

Seeding problem

[drHirudo]

This sounds nice. With the back up of HTTP server, this means the leechers will be irrelevant, when nobody else is seeding. Many people will just leech, watch and forget, without giving back seed. Because of the lack of seeds, the file hosting sites are so damn popular now. If everyone was seeding after download, then nobody would need file hosting services. Even YouTube, Vimeo and other video sites may go to this model then. (HTTP with backup of bit torrent and vice versa) cool cool cool. This gets even better for the people like me who have different Internet speed for country traffic and abroad traffic (I have 10 times faster traffic from local servers), so when torrenting from someone nearby, I will have faster speed, than downloading from the abroad server. Nice.

Re:Not Great Enough

[Pieroxy]

Are you thinking multicast? Because this is the real need here.

Can anyone fill us in on where is multicast on the internet right now? It seems pretty far away - even further away than IPv6.