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

Question

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.

Answer 1

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!

Answer 2

well as @coborsism says simple streaming is possible with swarm out of the box.

The roadmap item is referring to a project still very much in research stage, that will combine efficient multicast routing and adaptive bitrate encoding (e.g, MDASH, RT(S)P) to provide live one-to-many broadcast support for swarm.

A little bit more context is https://gist.github.com/zelig/74b3486bcd5523a0b61e12d804d3c00d and mention in my devcon2 slides http://swarm-gateways.net/talks/amsterdam-2016-09-07/web3.pdf

If your content is not live, the issue is much less problematic, broadcasting at a specific time then just requires timed release of your content's address and/or providing decrtyption keys. Both easily managed outside of swarm.