video-streamingaudio-streamingp2pblockchainethereum

Does the "holy trinity" (Ethereum, Swarm and Whisper) support multimedia streaming?


I'd like to stream media at specific time intervals - a sort of online radio if you will. I'm currently using Icecast but would much rather a peer to peer solution. I see there's a proof of concept for streaming on the Swarm roadmap but not much context around it.


Solution

  • You can absolutely stream files over swarm.

    While the routing protocol developed for swarm is likely to be abstracted out so that it can be used for any targeted data/message transfer (from one participating ethereum node to another) and this may be adaptable to streaming directly from you to your listeners, there is a simpler solution that will work right away:

    The idea is that you upload your music / content ahead of time to swarm and then later release the swarm ids one at a time via a different channel, be it whisper messages or an ENS registration change. Coupled with a front-end JS app that subscribes to your feed of swarm hashes and loads the appropriate swarm content, this should make a functioning radio station even with the alpha proof-of-concept version of swarm.

    good luck!