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Launch HN: Peer5 (YC W17) – Serverless CDN

108 points by shacharz 10y ago

shacharz 10y ago
Hi HN, I’m Shachar, co-founder and CTO of Peer5 - A P2P CDN for Video 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. We've also just announced the YC investment (W17) and our new native Android SDK on TC (https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/26/peer5-y-combinator/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/26/peer5-y-combinator/) Thanks!
siscia 10y ago
I was pondering to collaborate in a similar project and my main concern was mobile bandwith use. As a mobile user I would hate to have my data being use by some random company... It this address in some way?
- shacharz 10y ago
  Right, that's a great point. We take into account whether your mobile device is currently using Cellular or Wifi and make decisions based on that. (Today Cellular devices would not be uploading at all, just leeching)
  - siscia 10y ago
    Great :)
  - detaro 10y ago
    How about non-mobile devices? (Laptops tethered to phones, 3G-based Wifi-hotspots, ...)
    - shacharz 10y ago
      Devices connected through another device still have the same external ip - allowing us to detect it's indeed Cellular and not Wifi
mwseibel 10y ago
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 :)
- WhitneyLand 10y ago
  Has there ever been a business with significant commercial success that designed a peer to peer architecture to serve as the foundation of it's technology or IP? I can only think of one, that being Skype. Of course that doesn't mean Peer5 can't do it, and I sincerely hope they do because I always root for entrepreneurs. However there seems to be this weird disconnect between p2p architectures and profitable companies, even though the theory is so powerful. I can only guess as to why: - The illegal stuff has somehow unfairly tarnished public opinion - It's too low level and is only suitable for standards like WebRTC where lots of people buy in at once to provide enough momentum - It's not easy to do right
  - mwseibel 10y ago
    In terms of usage - Skype, Bit Torrent, and Bitcoin come to mind (last two aren't commercially successful yet...)
    - WhitneyLand 10y ago
      No reason you can't be the second one. Good luck to you and the team.
  - pquerna 10y ago
    I used to work at Joost. Culturally, it came fro the Skype world, and I worked on the p2p engine used for both on-demand and live streaming of video: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joost The cost of delivering content is not zero. The main variables are the codecs & quality of a stream, which on average is going up, and the cost to deliver (bandwidth/storage). The cost deliver keeps going down. So, there are periods of time, when a p2p approach "looks" nice. 4k? Maybe all this live-streaming stuff? Sure. But what happens is the cost of delivery with HTTP keeps going down. Joost had a bunch of other issues that made it fail, un-related to the use of p2p. p2p might be cheaper to operate for a business, but it has almost no advantages for users over a well built CDN. For users it only has negative attributes (baring a few situations on LANs / getting streams into places you can't put a CDN).
ryanchan001 10y ago
Hey guys! Your site looks awesome! Sorry for my noobness, but what is a serverless CDN, who is it for, and why do I need it?
- shacharz 10y ago
  Serverless CDN is the term we use to describe a CDN that uses no servers for the content itself. It's actually a Peer-to-Peer Content Delivery Network. Big content providers (like Netflix, Youtube, ESPN) can use that to deliver their content more efficiently and improve their users' experience. That results in less rebuffering for their users and lower costs on infrastructure.
TekMol 10y ago
You can turn a website visitor into a content delivery endpoint without them even noticing? I find that hard to believe.
- rkanter2 10y ago
  There are no downloads or plugins to make it work. All data moves through WebRTC after just a 2 lines of js. Web pages enabled with Peer5 look exactly the same as they did before it was implemented. They could notice if monitoring upstream bandwidth, although this would be absolutley negligible on Wifi connections.
  - TekMol 10y ago
    I did not expect that WebRTC would allow a website to make the browser deliver content to a 3rd party without the users consent. This has some strange privacy and copyright implications.
    - shacharz 10y ago
      That's a very much talked about subject in the standardization groups. They've concluded that WebRTC doesn't add any additional privacy or security exposure than what exists in the browsers previous to it. Can you please explain more why you think there are copyright implications?
      - nolok 10y ago
        I'm not sure about the US, but in the EU and in particular in my country of France, anti-piracy lawsuits have seen a very clearly drawn line between a mere downloader, and an uploader. That's what lead emule and bittorrent to be "dangerous" legally while direct downloading (newsgroup, rapidshare, ...) and streaming almost never led to conviction (even symbolic). That the user didn't realize his bittorrent was re-uploading content to others didn't matter. So, if I visit a website to get, say, direct copyrighted content (let's say photo, comics, music, whatever) and that website uses webrtc to make me reshare it to other users, my legal status just went from a almost never convicted downloader to a very much punished (even though it stayed symbolic, it was still a legal loss) uploader.
EuAndreh 10y ago
shacharz: Any plans of working with the IPFS team? They're solving many similar problems, and they do have an js client.
- shacharz 10y ago
  I just know about the IPFS team, but not familiar enough with their stuff. From my experience usually a synchronization oriented distributed algorithm can be very different from what a use-case like Video On Demand, or Live video requires. In terms of chunk allocations, predictions of what's going to be needed and so froth. But I definitely should familiarize myself more with their stuff.
divyahansg 10y ago
How is this different from PeerCDN?
- whadar 10y ago
  Hi, Hadar here, Co-founder and CEO of Peer5. PeerCDN started at about the same time as Peer5 and was a competitor. Later it was acquired by Yahoo. PeerCDN was a general purpose CDN, while Peer5 specializes in video. Feross, one of PeerCDN's founders and author of WebTorrent actually became my friend and we exchange ideas from time to time.
zitterbewegung 10y ago
How do you ensure that videos won't be modified by the users do you have an integrity check ?
- shacharz 10y ago
  Yes, we do hash verification of the fragments as they are received from users.
  - zitterbewegung 10y ago
    Could I perform a Sybil attack on the network?
    - shacharz 10y ago
      No, since the verification is done using signatures received from the server, without any reputation system involved.
koolba 10y ago
The pricing page says: > Only data delivered via P2P counts against your plan. Am I misunderstanding this or is that statement backwards? 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?
- k__ 10y ago
  the more they get onto p2p the more money they make. And the more is on p2p the faster stuff gets delivered and the happier the users are.
- einfach 10y ago
  I was going to ask the same thing. The Accounts & Billing FAQ does seem to concur that you pay for P2P delivery: > A: For the pay-per-Gigabyte tiers, Peer5 charges you at the end of the month based on the agreed upon price and actual amount of data delivered through our P2P CDN during the period. For the Pro tier, Peer5 bills the flat rate at the beginning of the month. For the free, Starter tier, there is no billing, but we do cap your P2P delivery at 1 TB per month.
  - shacharz 10y ago
    The point is that there's no double billing, http traffic is being billed by your existing CDN. P2P traffic is billed by us.
- detaro 10y ago
  Presumably the more traffic the P2P stuff serves, the more value it brings you (in saved CDN costs), and of course Peer5 would like to be paid as much as possible of that. Being paid by the same measure the thing you are replacing is commonly billed by seems sensible.
- whadar 10y ago
  The idea is that you're not double taxed. If you're using a CDN already like Akamai for instance, you wouldn't pay Peer5 for the HTTP bytes. Only Akamai would charge you for that.
niftich 10y ago
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 no shortage 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. 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? [1] https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/17/yahoo-acquires-peercdn/ https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/17/yahoo-acquires-peercdn/ [2] http://www.thesixthaxis.com/2013/03/14/microsoft-acquires-pando-next-xbox-uses-rumoured/ http://www.thesixthaxis.com/2013/03/14/microsoft-acquires-pa... [3] http://www.bittorrent.com/dna/ http://www.bittorrent.com/dna/
- mino 10y ago
  I was about to write exactly the same comment myself. Also, let me add: 1) how does this work behind NAT? 2) as someone else pointed out already, your logo looks like a cheap ripoff of HTML5 :) Good luck.
  - shacharz 10y ago
    1. WebRTC uses ICE[1] protocol to go over NAT and puncture Firwalls. 2. HTML5 logo is under common license agreement and we give it attribution in the /about page.
    - mino 10y ago
      1. Thanks. 2. Irrelevant: what tech people (i.e., the actual decision makers on becoming your customer) will immediately think is "look they plagiarised HTML5's logo", not "let me go through their site to see whether there's attribution" :)
- shacharz 10y ago
beardicus 10y ago
"Why the hell is Chrome uploading and downloading so much data?" * looks through open tabs * "Oh." 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). 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. Slick page though, and a good informative site... I don't mean to be a downer. Good luck!
- shacharz 10y ago
  2 valid points 1. We suggest a snippet today for our customers to notify their users. 2. https://www.peer5.com/about https://www.peer5.com/about towards the end of the page you can see the attribution.
bexp 10y ago
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.
- shacharz 10y ago
  We detect what network you're on, on a cellular network you wouldn't upload and only leech from other users and http.
  - heywire 10y ago
    Are you able to do that if the user is connected to a VPN? I frequently connect to a work VPN on my laptop using my phone as a hotspot.
    - shacharz 10y ago
      That's an interesting scenario, we didn't consider it but we can include it as well.
redindian75 10y ago
ISPs like Comcast have metered caps (1TB for our home). So now it will require ~2x bandwidth (down/up) to watch the same content. Basically shifting the content provider's CDN costs (which we pay subscription for) on the backs of consumer's metered internet? Seems like a triple whammy for consumers. Is your expectation/hope that they will share some of their cost savings?
- shacharz 10y ago
  No, we're not expecting the consumer to pay for the upload bandwidth. We're working with ISPs to not charge consumer for Peer5's upload traffic.
  - snug 10y ago
    So you're against, net neutrality? All traffic should be treated equally, no one, or company should be able to have a "free lane" as you're suggesting. Cool concept, but I agree with the rest of the criticism here.
  - sudosteph 10y ago
    How does that work? ISPs will charge for other traffic but not yours? Isn't that the definition of anti-net neutrality?
  - camus2 10y ago
    > No, we're not expecting the consumer to pay for the upload bandwidth. We're working with ISPs to not charge consumer for Peer5's upload traffic. A bit hard to believe. Do you have any agreements with ISP already?
- developer2 10y ago
  From their FAQ[1]: Q: Can Peer5 ever harm user experience? A: No. Peer5 can never deteriorate user experience. Q: How does Peer5 impact a user's upstream bandwidth? A: Peer5 works with whatever bandwidth is free for upstream use and will not impact other applications that require uploads at the same time as Peer5. Changes to upstream bandwidth are unnoticeable to the end user. --- The concept is great, but until every consumer internet service comes with unmetered bandwidth, this kind of peer-to-peer CDN must be treated as what it is: a dark pattern from content providers who are looking to save their own bottom line while directly harming their customers in the process. For every $1 a content provider saves by using this service, their users who happen to not have unmetered bandwidth will collectively pay dozens or hundreds of times that cost in overage fees to their ISPs. The fact that any business would use this technology and shrug their users' suffering off as an externality is disgusting to me. [1] https://www.peer5.com/faq https://www.peer5.com/faq
TekMol 10y ago
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... 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. I have to say it feels frightening, that the other users can see my IP. And probably other data about me. 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.
- whadar 10y ago
  When a user access any website of content providers online, they implicitly agree to the terms of service of that provider. When using Peer5, the terms of service includes a language about public IP temporarily visible to other users.
  - TekMol 10y ago
    This line of thinking makes me feel uncomfortable. That you can secretly give away data about me and which videos I watch because of some text in your TOS. I also doubt it would hold in court. TOS have a very restricted applicability. You can not use them to restrict people's rights in unexpected ways.
    - brilliantcode 10y ago
      Why not use VPN if you feel that uncomfortable? That's what it's designed for to hide your real IP.
    - oliwarner 10y ago
      An IP address is not PII. Linking it to viewed videos is still not PII. Good luck in court.
      - detaro 10y ago
        True in the US, not true in the EU. There is a reason Google Analytics has a switch to throw a few bits of an IP away, and it surely isn't because Google hates data. Given that they are selling a CDN, and thus likely want to sell to globally operating customers, that might become relevant relatively quickly.
chrissnell 10y ago
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: https://arstechnica.com/business/2009/02/cnn-p2p-video-streaming-tech-raises-questions/ https://arstechnica.com/business/2009/02/cnn-p2p-video-strea... How are you going to stop people from starving out bandwidth in large offices?
- semicolon_storm 10y ago
  Disable WebRTC on corporate computers? I'm assuming Peer5's solution falls back to servers when the browser doesn't support WebRTC.
  - chrissnell 10y ago
    OK, sure, but what about other environments like hotels and colleges? This is going to be the bane of IT administrators.
- shacharz 10y ago
  That's interesting, I know about Octoshape. But didn't know that in enterprise they actually made matters worse. The way our technology works is a bit like an 'onion' architecture. Users from the same corporation should communicate only with each other - and actually reduce the traffic on their internet connection - making the user experience better.
  - chrissnell 10y ago
    That's fantastic if that's the truth. I'm not sure how you deal with this. Big corps have many subnets so you need a reliable way to figure out who's link-local. Octoshape really was a disaster. During a major news event, many hundreds of employees could be live-streaming CNN and the effect was catastrophic.
bigbrooklyn 10y ago
Congrats! Maybe instead of or in addition to having users use their bandwidth, you can partner with ISPs like netflix openconnect to deliver content Unmetered networks - ISPs won't like you Metered networks - users won't like you Brace yourself P.S. Did you know disabling WebRTC in chrome isn't natively supported ?
- shacharz 10y ago
  Unmetered networks - ISP benefit from more local traffic and less traffic over their peering agreements connections. Metered networks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13502790 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13502790 TBH I didn't try to disable webrtc in chrome but there are extensions that do that [1] [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/disable%20webrtc?hl=en-US https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/disable%20webrtc?h...
  - bigbrooklyn 10y ago
    > Unmetered networks > Metered networks Cool! Does this mean all peer traffic is local ? Also, how can you detect when traffic is metered ?
    - shacharz 10y ago
      traffic is as localized as possible. As a general rule you can think of, if the peer is more local to you than the nearest CDN PoP you'll receive data from the peer, otherwise you'll receive data from the CDN. >Cool! Does this mean all peer traffic is local ? Also, how can you detect when traffic is metered ? We combine both client side and server side methods for that.
      - nix0n 10y ago
        > if the peer is more local to you How is this determined? Just WebRTC ping?
amelius 10y ago
Is it possible to distribute videos in an encrypted form using this CDN?
- shacharz 10y ago
  Yup, we support both AES-128 for HLS and any Common Encryption based DRM, that's true because we're basically agnostic to the content it self we just deliver it more efficiently.
woah 10y ago
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?
- shacharz 10y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13501923 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13501923
jaypaulynice 10y ago
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... 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... Also this sounds like a perfect target for DDoS attacks...
- shacharz 10y ago
  Indeed Red Swoosh was probably one of the first P2P CDN companies, the main difference from them is the underlying technology - WebRTC enabling a seamless experience for the end user. CDN is still a very expensive business to bootstrap and most companies in the world rely on Akamai and Akamai like companies. We provide a few advantages over a traditional CDN: 1. Geographically ubiquitous distribution - wherever there's demand, there's capacity. 2. Improved user experience - since each user can download content both from the existing CDN and multiple other peers it can fetch that content faster and be less exposed to network conditions between it and the CDN's PoP 3. Scale - CDNs as big as they are, even Akamai have a limit, and this pronounces it self the most specifically in live events. Today's biggest live events over the internet has been single digit million concurrent users and they were using several CDNs at the same time. The potential of a P2P CDN is to bring TV scale events to the internet. Please elaborate how you think it can facilitate a DDoS?
kev009 10y ago
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. 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. 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. 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.
akhilcacharya 10y ago
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.
- shacharz 10y ago
  Hey, thanks we used three.js for it. We also wrote a blog post about how we built it - https://blog.peer5.com/peer5-live-network/ https://blog.peer5.com/peer5-live-network/
  - akhilcacharya 10y ago
    Excellent, thanks!
nl 10y ago
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?".
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
csomar 10y ago
Am I the only one who thinks that the video app should ask for my permission before doing such a thing? Is this 1. ethical and 2. legal?
- huancle 10y ago
  Yes, we agree with you that users should know that p2p is happening and that they can opt out. We work with our customers to notify users and to give them the appropriate opt-in or opt-our mechanisms.
joemcelroy 10y ago
Does it find the closest node to you? For live streaming, being close to a source is important to us.
- shacharz 10y ago
  Yes it does, there'll be other parameters but the main goal is to find the nodes that'll help each other the most, and usually that'll be the closest ones. Live streaming is the best use-case, where Peer5 has the most value to give.
anilgulecha 10y ago
Can I be bold and say: this is malware? Any involuntary p2p, specially one that eats heavily into a quota, can be classified as malware. Is this a good criteria to ad-block the peer5 script URLs?
- huancle 10y ago
  Please note that Peer5's p2p is not involuntary. Peer5 is not the broadcaster at the end of the day, our customers are. We work with our customers to notify users that their use of streaming services on a particular site may entail participation in p2p and to give them the appropriate opt-in or opt-our mechanisms. Anyone who doesn't want to participate is not forced to.

108 points by shacharz 10y ago

Hi HN, I’m Shachar, co-founder and CTO of Peer5 - A P2P CDN for Video 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. We've also just announced the YC investment (W17) and our new native Android SDK on TC (https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/26/peer5-y-combinator/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/26/peer5-y-combinator/) Thanks!

siscia 10y ago

I was pondering to collaborate in a similar project and my main concern was mobile bandwith use. As a mobile user I would hate to have my data being use by some random company... It this address in some way?

shacharz 10y ago
Right, that's a great point. We take into account whether your mobile device is currently using Cellular or Wifi and make decisions based on that. (Today Cellular devices would not be uploading at all, just leeching)
- siscia 10y ago
  Great :)
- detaro 10y ago
  How about non-mobile devices? (Laptops tethered to phones, 3G-based Wifi-hotspots, ...)
  - shacharz 10y ago
    Devices connected through another device still have the same external ip - allowing us to detect it's indeed Cellular and not Wifi

mwseibel 10y ago

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 :)

WhitneyLand 10y ago
Has there ever been a business with significant commercial success that designed a peer to peer architecture to serve as the foundation of it's technology or IP? I can only think of one, that being Skype. Of course that doesn't mean Peer5 can't do it, and I sincerely hope they do because I always root for entrepreneurs. However there seems to be this weird disconnect between p2p architectures and profitable companies, even though the theory is so powerful. I can only guess as to why: - The illegal stuff has somehow unfairly tarnished public opinion - It's too low level and is only suitable for standards like WebRTC where lots of people buy in at once to provide enough momentum - It's not easy to do right
- mwseibel 10y ago
  In terms of usage - Skype, Bit Torrent, and Bitcoin come to mind (last two aren't commercially successful yet...)
  - WhitneyLand 10y ago
    No reason you can't be the second one. Good luck to you and the team.
- pquerna 10y ago
  I used to work at Joost. Culturally, it came fro the Skype world, and I worked on the p2p engine used for both on-demand and live streaming of video: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joost The cost of delivering content is not zero. The main variables are the codecs & quality of a stream, which on average is going up, and the cost to deliver (bandwidth/storage). The cost deliver keeps going down. So, there are periods of time, when a p2p approach "looks" nice. 4k? Maybe all this live-streaming stuff? Sure. But what happens is the cost of delivery with HTTP keeps going down. Joost had a bunch of other issues that made it fail, un-related to the use of p2p. p2p might be cheaper to operate for a business, but it has almost no advantages for users over a well built CDN. For users it only has negative attributes (baring a few situations on LANs / getting streams into places you can't put a CDN).

ryanchan001 10y ago

Hey guys! Your site looks awesome! Sorry for my noobness, but what is a serverless CDN, who is it for, and why do I need it?

shacharz 10y ago
Serverless CDN is the term we use to describe a CDN that uses no servers for the content itself. It's actually a Peer-to-Peer Content Delivery Network. Big content providers (like Netflix, Youtube, ESPN) can use that to deliver their content more efficiently and improve their users' experience. That results in less rebuffering for their users and lower costs on infrastructure.

TekMol 10y ago

You can turn a website visitor into a content delivery endpoint without them even noticing? I find that hard to believe.

rkanter2 10y ago
There are no downloads or plugins to make it work. All data moves through WebRTC after just a 2 lines of js. Web pages enabled with Peer5 look exactly the same as they did before it was implemented. They could notice if monitoring upstream bandwidth, although this would be absolutley negligible on Wifi connections.
- TekMol 10y ago
  I did not expect that WebRTC would allow a website to make the browser deliver content to a 3rd party without the users consent. This has some strange privacy and copyright implications.
  - shacharz 10y ago
    That's a very much talked about subject in the standardization groups. They've concluded that WebRTC doesn't add any additional privacy or security exposure than what exists in the browsers previous to it. Can you please explain more why you think there are copyright implications?
    - nolok 10y ago
      I'm not sure about the US, but in the EU and in particular in my country of France, anti-piracy lawsuits have seen a very clearly drawn line between a mere downloader, and an uploader. That's what lead emule and bittorrent to be "dangerous" legally while direct downloading (newsgroup, rapidshare, ...) and streaming almost never led to conviction (even symbolic). That the user didn't realize his bittorrent was re-uploading content to others didn't matter. So, if I visit a website to get, say, direct copyrighted content (let's say photo, comics, music, whatever) and that website uses webrtc to make me reshare it to other users, my legal status just went from a almost never convicted downloader to a very much punished (even though it stayed symbolic, it was still a legal loss) uploader.

EuAndreh 10y ago

shacharz: Any plans of working with the IPFS team? They're solving many similar problems, and they do have an js client.

shacharz 10y ago
I just know about the IPFS team, but not familiar enough with their stuff. From my experience usually a synchronization oriented distributed algorithm can be very different from what a use-case like Video On Demand, or Live video requires. In terms of chunk allocations, predictions of what's going to be needed and so froth. But I definitely should familiarize myself more with their stuff.

divyahansg 10y ago

How is this different from PeerCDN?

whadar 10y ago
Hi, Hadar here, Co-founder and CEO of Peer5. PeerCDN started at about the same time as Peer5 and was a competitor. Later it was acquired by Yahoo. PeerCDN was a general purpose CDN, while Peer5 specializes in video. Feross, one of PeerCDN's founders and author of WebTorrent actually became my friend and we exchange ideas from time to time.

zitterbewegung 10y ago

How do you ensure that videos won't be modified by the users do you have an integrity check ?

shacharz 10y ago
Yes, we do hash verification of the fragments as they are received from users.
- zitterbewegung 10y ago
  Could I perform a Sybil attack on the network?
  - shacharz 10y ago
    No, since the verification is done using signatures received from the server, without any reputation system involved.

koolba 10y ago

The pricing page says: > Only data delivered via P2P counts against your plan. Am I misunderstanding this or is that statement backwards? 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?

k__ 10y ago
the more they get onto p2p the more money they make. And the more is on p2p the faster stuff gets delivered and the happier the users are.
einfach 10y ago
I was going to ask the same thing. The Accounts & Billing FAQ does seem to concur that you pay for P2P delivery: > A: For the pay-per-Gigabyte tiers, Peer5 charges you at the end of the month based on the agreed upon price and actual amount of data delivered through our P2P CDN during the period. For the Pro tier, Peer5 bills the flat rate at the beginning of the month. For the free, Starter tier, there is no billing, but we do cap your P2P delivery at 1 TB per month.
- shacharz 10y ago
  The point is that there's no double billing, http traffic is being billed by your existing CDN. P2P traffic is billed by us.
detaro 10y ago
Presumably the more traffic the P2P stuff serves, the more value it brings you (in saved CDN costs), and of course Peer5 would like to be paid as much as possible of that. Being paid by the same measure the thing you are replacing is commonly billed by seems sensible.
whadar 10y ago
The idea is that you're not double taxed. If you're using a CDN already like Akamai for instance, you wouldn't pay Peer5 for the HTTP bytes. Only Akamai would charge you for that.

niftich 10y ago

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 no shortage 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. 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? [1] https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/17/yahoo-acquires-peercdn/ https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/17/yahoo-acquires-peercdn/ [2] http://www.thesixthaxis.com/2013/03/14/microsoft-acquires-pando-next-xbox-uses-rumoured/ http://www.thesixthaxis.com/2013/03/14/microsoft-acquires-pa... [3] http://www.bittorrent.com/dna/ http://www.bittorrent.com/dna/

mino 10y ago
I was about to write exactly the same comment myself. Also, let me add: 1) how does this work behind NAT? 2) as someone else pointed out already, your logo looks like a cheap ripoff of HTML5 :) Good luck.
- shacharz 10y ago
  1. WebRTC uses ICE[1] protocol to go over NAT and puncture Firwalls. 2. HTML5 logo is under common license agreement and we give it attribution in the /about page.
  - mino 10y ago
    1. Thanks. 2. Irrelevant: what tech people (i.e., the actual decision makers on becoming your customer) will immediately think is "look they plagiarised HTML5's logo", not "let me go through their site to see whether there's attribution" :)
shacharz 10y ago

beardicus 10y ago

"Why the hell is Chrome uploading and downloading so much data?" * looks through open tabs * "Oh." 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). 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. Slick page though, and a good informative site... I don't mean to be a downer. Good luck!

shacharz 10y ago
2 valid points 1. We suggest a snippet today for our customers to notify their users. 2. https://www.peer5.com/about https://www.peer5.com/about towards the end of the page you can see the attribution.

bexp 10y ago

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.

shacharz 10y ago
We detect what network you're on, on a cellular network you wouldn't upload and only leech from other users and http.
- heywire 10y ago
  Are you able to do that if the user is connected to a VPN? I frequently connect to a work VPN on my laptop using my phone as a hotspot.
  - shacharz 10y ago
    That's an interesting scenario, we didn't consider it but we can include it as well.

redindian75 10y ago

ISPs like Comcast have metered caps (1TB for our home). So now it will require ~2x bandwidth (down/up) to watch the same content. Basically shifting the content provider's CDN costs (which we pay subscription for) on the backs of consumer's metered internet? Seems like a triple whammy for consumers. Is your expectation/hope that they will share some of their cost savings?

shacharz 10y ago
No, we're not expecting the consumer to pay for the upload bandwidth. We're working with ISPs to not charge consumer for Peer5's upload traffic.
- snug 10y ago
  So you're against, net neutrality? All traffic should be treated equally, no one, or company should be able to have a "free lane" as you're suggesting. Cool concept, but I agree with the rest of the criticism here.
- sudosteph 10y ago
  How does that work? ISPs will charge for other traffic but not yours? Isn't that the definition of anti-net neutrality?
- camus2 10y ago
  > No, we're not expecting the consumer to pay for the upload bandwidth. We're working with ISPs to not charge consumer for Peer5's upload traffic. A bit hard to believe. Do you have any agreements with ISP already?
developer2 10y ago
From their FAQ[1]: Q: Can Peer5 ever harm user experience? A: No. Peer5 can never deteriorate user experience. Q: How does Peer5 impact a user's upstream bandwidth? A: Peer5 works with whatever bandwidth is free for upstream use and will not impact other applications that require uploads at the same time as Peer5. Changes to upstream bandwidth are unnoticeable to the end user. --- The concept is great, but until every consumer internet service comes with unmetered bandwidth, this kind of peer-to-peer CDN must be treated as what it is: a dark pattern from content providers who are looking to save their own bottom line while directly harming their customers in the process. For every $1 a content provider saves by using this service, their users who happen to not have unmetered bandwidth will collectively pay dozens or hundreds of times that cost in overage fees to their ISPs. The fact that any business would use this technology and shrug their users' suffering off as an externality is disgusting to me. [1] https://www.peer5.com/faq https://www.peer5.com/faq

TekMol 10y ago

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... 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. I have to say it feels frightening, that the other users can see my IP. And probably other data about me. 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.

whadar 10y ago
When a user access any website of content providers online, they implicitly agree to the terms of service of that provider. When using Peer5, the terms of service includes a language about public IP temporarily visible to other users.
- TekMol 10y ago
  This line of thinking makes me feel uncomfortable. That you can secretly give away data about me and which videos I watch because of some text in your TOS. I also doubt it would hold in court. TOS have a very restricted applicability. You can not use them to restrict people's rights in unexpected ways.
  - brilliantcode 10y ago
    Why not use VPN if you feel that uncomfortable? That's what it's designed for to hide your real IP.
  - oliwarner 10y ago
    An IP address is not PII. Linking it to viewed videos is still not PII. Good luck in court.
    - detaro 10y ago
      True in the US, not true in the EU. There is a reason Google Analytics has a switch to throw a few bits of an IP away, and it surely isn't because Google hates data. Given that they are selling a CDN, and thus likely want to sell to globally operating customers, that might become relevant relatively quickly.

chrissnell 10y ago

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: https://arstechnica.com/business/2009/02/cnn-p2p-video-streaming-tech-raises-questions/ https://arstechnica.com/business/2009/02/cnn-p2p-video-strea... How are you going to stop people from starving out bandwidth in large offices?

semicolon_storm 10y ago
Disable WebRTC on corporate computers? I'm assuming Peer5's solution falls back to servers when the browser doesn't support WebRTC.
- chrissnell 10y ago
  OK, sure, but what about other environments like hotels and colleges? This is going to be the bane of IT administrators.
shacharz 10y ago
That's interesting, I know about Octoshape. But didn't know that in enterprise they actually made matters worse. The way our technology works is a bit like an 'onion' architecture. Users from the same corporation should communicate only with each other - and actually reduce the traffic on their internet connection - making the user experience better.
- chrissnell 10y ago
  That's fantastic if that's the truth. I'm not sure how you deal with this. Big corps have many subnets so you need a reliable way to figure out who's link-local. Octoshape really was a disaster. During a major news event, many hundreds of employees could be live-streaming CNN and the effect was catastrophic.

bigbrooklyn 10y ago

Congrats! Maybe instead of or in addition to having users use their bandwidth, you can partner with ISPs like netflix openconnect to deliver content Unmetered networks - ISPs won't like you Metered networks - users won't like you Brace yourself P.S. Did you know disabling WebRTC in chrome isn't natively supported ?

shacharz 10y ago
Unmetered networks - ISP benefit from more local traffic and less traffic over their peering agreements connections. Metered networks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13502790 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13502790 TBH I didn't try to disable webrtc in chrome but there are extensions that do that [1] [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/disable%20webrtc?hl=en-US https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/disable%20webrtc?h...
- bigbrooklyn 10y ago
  > Unmetered networks > Metered networks Cool! Does this mean all peer traffic is local ? Also, how can you detect when traffic is metered ?
  - shacharz 10y ago
    traffic is as localized as possible. As a general rule you can think of, if the peer is more local to you than the nearest CDN PoP you'll receive data from the peer, otherwise you'll receive data from the CDN. >Cool! Does this mean all peer traffic is local ? Also, how can you detect when traffic is metered ? We combine both client side and server side methods for that.
    - nix0n 10y ago
      > if the peer is more local to you How is this determined? Just WebRTC ping?

amelius 10y ago

Is it possible to distribute videos in an encrypted form using this CDN?

shacharz 10y ago
Yup, we support both AES-128 for HLS and any Common Encryption based DRM, that's true because we're basically agnostic to the content it self we just deliver it more efficiently.

woah 10y ago

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?

shacharz 10y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13501923 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13501923

jaypaulynice 10y ago

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... 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... Also this sounds like a perfect target for DDoS attacks...

shacharz 10y ago
Indeed Red Swoosh was probably one of the first P2P CDN companies, the main difference from them is the underlying technology - WebRTC enabling a seamless experience for the end user. CDN is still a very expensive business to bootstrap and most companies in the world rely on Akamai and Akamai like companies. We provide a few advantages over a traditional CDN: 1. Geographically ubiquitous distribution - wherever there's demand, there's capacity. 2. Improved user experience - since each user can download content both from the existing CDN and multiple other peers it can fetch that content faster and be less exposed to network conditions between it and the CDN's PoP 3. Scale - CDNs as big as they are, even Akamai have a limit, and this pronounces it self the most specifically in live events. Today's biggest live events over the internet has been single digit million concurrent users and they were using several CDNs at the same time. The potential of a P2P CDN is to bring TV scale events to the internet. Please elaborate how you think it can facilitate a DDoS?

kev009 10y ago

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. 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. 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. 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.

akhilcacharya 10y ago

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.

shacharz 10y ago
Hey, thanks we used three.js for it. We also wrote a blog post about how we built it - https://blog.peer5.com/peer5-live-network/ https://blog.peer5.com/peer5-live-network/
- akhilcacharya 10y ago
  Excellent, thanks!

nl 10y ago

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?".

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

csomar 10y ago

Am I the only one who thinks that the video app should ask for my permission before doing such a thing? Is this 1. ethical and 2. legal?

huancle 10y ago
Yes, we agree with you that users should know that p2p is happening and that they can opt out. We work with our customers to notify users and to give them the appropriate opt-in or opt-our mechanisms.

joemcelroy 10y ago

Does it find the closest node to you? For live streaming, being close to a source is important to us.

shacharz 10y ago
Yes it does, there'll be other parameters but the main goal is to find the nodes that'll help each other the most, and usually that'll be the closest ones. Live streaming is the best use-case, where Peer5 has the most value to give.

anilgulecha 10y ago

Can I be bold and say: this is malware? Any involuntary p2p, specially one that eats heavily into a quota, can be classified as malware. Is this a good criteria to ad-block the peer5 script URLs?

huancle 10y ago
Please note that Peer5's p2p is not involuntary. Peer5 is not the broadcaster at the end of the day, our customers are. We work with our customers to notify users that their use of streaming services on a particular site may entail participation in p2p and to give them the appropriate opt-in or opt-our mechanisms. Anyone who doesn't want to participate is not forced to.