Slapvid - video player using p2p network

Video on the Web is now very popular, but it generates a huge traffic. So, last year Youtube spent more than $ 1 million per month on traffic, showing over 100 million videos a day. In response, video hosting sites are eyeing the transfer of higher-quality videos using p2p networks, using the traffic of the users themselves. Now most services use desktop applications (Joost, Babelgum) for this purpose. A new startup Slapvid wants to provide users with a browser player that uses the principle of p2p networks.

Slapvid runs as a Java applet along with an Adobe Flash player. This means that the user will have to download a 300kb “weight” applet for the first time - this action excludes the installation of a browser plugin. This applet controls in the background the delivery of parts of videos for display in the player.

At the beginning of the video playback, the player connects to the central server to download the beginning of the video, while buffering files from the p2p network. During this request, the server also sends you a list of 3-5 network members watching this video. The video is sent in parts, each 64K. If there are no users losing your video, it is downloaded from the central server.

The service is in the process of closed beta testing, but you can look at the demo player on this page .