Hi HN, I’m Shachar, co-founder and CTO of Peer5 - A P2P CDN for Video<p>We started Peer5 4 years ago, when we heard about WebRTC, and thought this is a ground changing technology that fundamentally change the way the web could work. Yea, and also because we’re geeks that love cool technologies like that.
I’ll be here to answer any questions, and get feedback from you guys.<p>We've also just announced the YC investment (W17) and our new native Android SDK on TC (<a href="https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/26/peer5-y-combinator/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/26/peer5-y-combinator/</a>)
Thanks!
When you run "pktstat -n" while watching the video, you can see the IPs of other visitors of the website. I see people from Sweden, the USA, Japan, Brazil...<p>Since among the HN users there are probably a lot of developers, I tried to put some of the IPs into my browser. And indeed, already the second IP I tried sent back a reply from a (misconfigured) server.<p>I have to say it feels frightening, that the other users can see my IP. And probably other data about me.<p>Also I would expect it's not legal in most places around the world to give away the IP of a visitor to other visitors. Can't imagine it is legal in Europe.
ISPs like Comcast have metered caps (1TB for our home).<p>So now it will require ~2x bandwidth (down/up) to watch the same content. Basically shifting the content provider's CDN costs (which <i>we pay</i> subscription for) on the backs of consumer's <i>metered</i> internet? Seems like a triple whammy for consumers.<p>Is your expectation/hope that they will share some of their cost savings?
Grats on your launch! I echo the sibling comment that was slightly faster in asking about the disconnect between p2p companies and profitability. There has been <i>no shortage</i> of efforts that tried to capitalize (and monetize) on the success of 'bandwidth sharing' that was perhaps brought to the forefront by BitTorrent, although pioneered before by early p2p networks.<p>Most of these companies appear to have faltered, while a few of them were bought out by big companies (example: [1][2]) and their technology has yet to be conclusively observed in the wild. Yet another class continues to run their offerings, but has drastically toned down marketing (example: [3]) There are also a good number of non-commercial explorations in this space, of various quality, from toys to demos to full-fledged networks. How do you plan to distinguish yourself?<p>[1] <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/17/yahoo-acquires-peercdn/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/17/yahoo-acquires-peercdn/</a>
[2] <a href="http://www.thesixthaxis.com/2013/03/14/microsoft-acquires-pando-next-xbox-uses-rumoured/" rel="nofollow">http://www.thesixthaxis.com/2013/03/14/microsoft-acquires-pa...</a>
[3] <a href="http://www.bittorrent.com/dna/" rel="nofollow">http://www.bittorrent.com/dna/</a>
This was done already, almost a decade ago. CNN.com used it and it was total hell for us, running a corporate LAN, because it flooded out our upstream bandwidth, especially when multiple people used it. Their product ended up being considered, basically, as malware:<p><a href="https://arstechnica.com/business/2009/02/cnn-p2p-video-streaming-tech-raises-questions/" rel="nofollow">https://arstechnica.com/business/2009/02/cnn-p2p-video-strea...</a><p>How are you going to stop people from starving out bandwidth in large offices?
Hey everyone - this is Michael Seibel - I'm one of the group partners for Peer5 and I'm really excited they have launched. If you have any questions for me - feel free to ask :)
"Why the hell is Chrome uploading and downloading so much data?"<p>* looks through open tabs *<p>"Oh."<p>Though most people would never notice, I feel like with developers (the folks who will implement this on their sites) you may have a tough time convincing them this is safe and ethical. I suggest being up front about this issue and suggesting disclosure/consent strategies to any of your customers (and perhaps doing research and surveys to prove that nobody really minds this use of their bandwidth).<p>Also, it's kinda weird that you've appropriated the HTML 5 logo into your own. That's probably within the logo's Creative Commons license, but I don't see where you've given attribution as required by said license.<p>Slick page though, and a good informative site... I don't mean to be a downer. Good luck!
The pricing page says:<p>> Only data delivered via P2P counts against your plan.<p>Am I misunderstanding this or is that statement backwards?<p>Isn't the point of a P2P network to get the distributed network benefits of your user base and if so why would I pay for that versus the data that's coming directly off the primary channel?
Congrats!<p>Maybe instead of or in addition to having users use their bandwidth, you can partner with ISPs like netflix openconnect to deliver content<p>Unmetered networks - ISPs won't like you<p>Metered networks - users won't like you<p>Brace yourself<p>P.S. Did you know disabling WebRTC in chrome isn't natively supported ?
This is cool from a philosophy of the internet angle. It's also one of the worst workloads to try with P2P so it will be interesting to watch as a business.<p>There are a number of fundamentally half-duplex technologies in widespread use, such as wifi. Others have very different transmission characteristics, for instance tx uses a second frequency on cellular but is obviously more power hungry, whereas DOCSIS, wifi, and pretty much any radio network have batching and even ack filtering that make ack clocking or even state of the art things like BBR congestion control difficult. On "eyeball networks", ISPs provision for downstream ratio and wholesale upload bandwidth to businesses as transit. That may manifest as policy such as upload caps, or monetarily. Drastically changing their network profile is more likely to result in hasty policy and financial games rather than re-architecture or capacity expansion.<p>Also fundamentally, TCP is "easy" as a receiver and most stacks in common use are good receivers. TCP as a sender is hard, and most stacks have a ways to come, aside from sub-optimal defaults.<p>Hard problems. Doesn't mean there aren't simple solutions like aggressively clamping where the tech is used. It also might spring the problem on other people (ISPs, and I mean this non-condescendingly but end users) in a way that is eventually a net win.
I was pondering to collaborate in a similar project and my main concern was mobile bandwith use.<p>As a mobile user I would hate to have my data being use by some random company...<p>It this address in some way?
It's a little amusing how we see many stories with comments begging for more "decentralized platforms", and when one ships people go "wait.. they can see my IP?".
This sounds like Red Swoosh, a company Travis Kalanick (Uber CEO) started and was acquired by Akamai back in 2007. I was surprised that Akamai is a partner. They already do that...<p>But anyways CDN is highly commoditized now and most big players are building their own solutions. What advantage do you offer? It does not seem like it would be a great solution for live streaming...<p>Also this sounds like a perfect target for DDoS attacks...
This reminds me of PeerCDN, which was acquired by Yahoo 4 years ago. One of the founders, Feross, went on to build the excellent open source WebTorrent library using many of the same technologies. Glad to see someone actually doing this! How does it compare to PeerCDN?
Out of curiosity, what is being used to have the dots on the globe in the landing page? I've been trying to find out how to do this for a while, but I don't know which libraries are designed for it.
Can I be bold and say: this is malware?<p>Any involuntary p2p, specially one that eats <i>heavily</i> into a quota, can be classified as malware. Is this a good criteria to ad-block the peer5 script URLs?
Hi @shacharz do customers approve that his device would be used in p2p work ? For example if I'm on cell network I don't want to server traffic to other clients.