A hybrid Peer-to-Peer Model to HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) Content Delivery Networks

Introduction

BemTV is an attempt to scale live video streaming using P2P without the need of an external plug-in. It uses the powers of WebRTC to build swarms considering peer's geolocation and their internet carriers.

How?

Almost all modern browsers supports WebRTC. However, except Safari on MacOS, none of them supports HTTP Live Streaming (HLS). I've solved this issue using a Flash-based player with an open source plugin that empowers the player with HLS playback.

BemTV acts intercepting the requests for chunks by the player, trying to fetch it from a peer swarm. If nobody serves, it will get it from the CDN. That's why it's called a Hybrid Model.

Let me try

Actually the playback is still a little weird (I'm experiencing some stucks and rebuffering events), but I'm trying to improve it. Try calling a friend near you that uses the same internet carrier and have fun.

BemTV on OSMF-based player (deprecated)

BemTV on HLSProvider chromeless player

Building on your machine

First, you'll need ruby/rubygems and node/npm installed. Then:

$ gem install bundler
$ bundle

This will install necessary gems to build our flash-based player. We'll also install rake, a tool that handles build commands. Let's build everything:

$ rake build_all

Now you have a snapshot of BemTV.js, our ChromelessPlayer and a hlsprovider.html example on html/ path. Point your favorite http server to this directory and happy hacking.

You can also build just BemTV.js:

$ rake build_js

Or the swf player:

$ rake build_swf

Pull requests are encouraged.