Peer-to-Peer Video Streaming in HTML5 with WebTorrent

Multimedia-related businesses dealing with movie streaming and video-based short messages have increased the global Internet video traffic substantially in the last couple of years. At the same time, multimedia on the Web has been standardized in terms of codecs and browser-based JavaScript APIs. However, the technological challenges concerning the distribution of large video files are today 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. In this article, we conceptualize methods to offload video delivery from centralized clouds to clients. In particular, we implemented and evaluated a system that streams videos peer-to-peer via WebTorrent in HTML5. The resulting library is available open source.