swirl

Bittorrent the protocol was built so that you can fetch any part of the content in any way order you want (that's the beauty of it: traditional forward streaming is not different than out-of-order streaming) Bittorrent the network, now, lives because peers have an incentive to behave correctly and spread the content on nodes as much as possible. It's a specific use of the protocol, but not the only one. The problem is that many people (even technical) conflate the protocol with how it's used the most: spread stuff illegally. In order to do this there is a need for peers fetching parts out-of-order. But if, say, Netflix were to distribute its content over Bittorrent, it would be perfectly fine to stream in-order, because the Netflix peers all have all the content so there is no need to spread the content here. And there already is an enhan

Not yet, but integrating with apps like dropbox or similar etc is a nice feature, I'll add that to the official list. PPSP's key features are: - live streaming using an innovative method that can be easily secured - optimised for fast start - using a standard protocol (UDP) for maximum carrier friendliness - efficient storage of hash tables via binmap - use of merkle trees for verifying content without needing the whole hash table to be transferred to every client - LEDBAT for playing fair with other bandwidth on the client connections More details on these https://github.com/skunkwerks/swirl/blob/feature/docs/doc/me... and also in the IETF spec http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-ppsp-peer-protocol

Looks interesting. Erlang VM (BEAM) is a good choice for this. It is also a hard problem. I copied a short description of the protocol from their GitHub overview doc: https://github.com/skunkwerks/swirl/blob/feature/docs/doc/ov... --- PPSP is a transport protocol — it transfers a stream of opaque binary data from one location to another. It is unique amongst transport protocols as it is a many-to-many transfer protocol, that is, there is no single master server or endpoint that manages the data transfer. A swarm is a set of peers that are sharing (receiving and/or transferring) the same data, as a set of small chunks, which is identified by a unique cryptographic recursive hash of the data, called the Root Hash. ---