In order to help offset the costs of delivering an increasing amount of video, Wikipedia is experimenting with BitTorrent P2P technology.
As Michael Dale notes in the foundation’s announcement, “One potential problem with increased video usage on the Wikimedia sites is that video is many times more costly to distribute than text and images that make up Wikipedia articles today. Eventually bandwidth costs could saturate the foundation budget or leave less resources for other projects and programs. For this reason it is important to start exploring and experimenting with future content distribution platforms and partnerships.”
One of these partnerships is with the P2P-Next consortium, an EU-funded project whose open source SwarmPlayer V2.0 will help reduce video distribution costs by sharing file distribution.
SwarmPlayer is a Firefox add-on that allows Wikipedia users to easily share their upload bandwidth to help distribute video. The add-on also works with the Kaltura HTML5 library and url2torrent.net.
If you visit Wikipedia without SwarmPlayer, video is streamed from the normal server. But with SwarmPlayer installed, the .torrent is requested and downloaded from the peer-to-peer network. To ensure smooth video playback, a fallback mechanism to the normal Wikipedia video servers is implemented.
SwarmPlayer can be configured to determine how much bandwidth you use to upload. And even if you upload nothing, using the add-on allows you to help distribute video loads by playing it from the P2P network – and helps ease the load on Wikipedia’s servers.
