Swarmcast

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Swarmcast (http://www.swarmcast.com) is a provider of Internet television service. It is headquartered in Minneapolis and Tokyo with branch offices in Zurich, San Francisco and New York City. It employs approximately 50 people.

History

Swarmcast the company was founded in 2001 by Justin Chapweske under the name Onion Networks. Swarmcast was originally the name of an innovative peer-to-peer software product developed by Opencola in the Java programming language. The Swarmcast software introduced an early bittorrent-like transfer protocol, with the intention to provide content creators with more control over the distribution of their product than was permitted by other P2P protocols at the time.[1]

In 2006 the company received $5 million of investment capital and in 2007 relaunched as Swarmcast to focus on Internet television. Client Major League Baseball has used its Mosaic product, which offered viewers simultaneous access to video feeds from four baseball games.[2]

Technology overview

Swarmcast’s video delivery platform, the Autobahn Platform, uses adaptive bitrate streaming, encodes at many different bitrates, and switches bitrates as a user's network conditions change.[3] It uses HTTP for video streaming, and can talk to Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Systems Flash.[4]

Early versions of Chapweske’s technology were based on peer-to-peer data transfer techniques, but today Swarmcast does not utilize any form of P2P data transfer.

References

  1. ↑ OpenP2p article on Swarmcast from 2001-05-24, retrieved 2009-12-04
  2. ↑ StreamingMedia.com Geoff Daily. 2007-01-04. Retrieved 2009-02-16
  3. ↑ http://swarmcast.com/showcase
  4. ↑ http://swarmcast.com/showcase

External links

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