OakStreaming: A Peer-to-Peer Video Streaming Library

Multimedia platforms dealing with movie streaming and video-based short messages have increased the global Internet video traffic substantially in the last couple of years. Over the same period, multimedia on the Web has been standardized in terms of codecs and browser-based JavaScript APIs. However, today the technological challenges concerning the distribution of large video files are mainly tackled by scaling up capacities in cloud data centers, or relying on content delivery networks. Both approaches favor financially strong, large companies, while independent video providers with highly demanded videos are disadvantaged. Peer-to-peer streaming provides an alternative by shifting the data streams to the clients. In this article, we conceptualize different methods to move video delivery from centralized cloud infrastructures to end user devices. We discuss their strengths & weaknesses and present design considerations. To exemplify a particular approach, we showcase the implementation and evaluation of OakStreaming, our system that streams videos peer-to-peer via WebTorrent in HTML5. Particularly, we offer Web video providers a library that has various parameters, for instance to limit the bandwidth available for peer-to-peer uploads. The resulting library is available as open source software on GitHub.