
Launch HN: Peer5 (YC W17) – Serverless CDN - shacharz
https://www.peer5.com
======
shacharz
Hi HN, I’m Shachar, co-founder and CTO of Peer5 - A P2P CDN for Video

We started Peer5 4 years ago, when we heard about WebRTC, and thought this is
a ground changing technology that fundamentally change the way the web could
work. Yea, and also because we’re geeks that love cool technologies like that.
I’ll be here to answer any questions, and get feedback from you guys.

We've also just announced the YC investment (W17) and our new native Android
SDK on TC
([https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/26/peer5-y-combinator/](https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/26/peer5-y-combinator/))
Thanks!

------
TekMol
When you run "pktstat -n" while watching the video, you can see the IPs of
other visitors of the website. I see people from Sweden, the USA, Japan,
Brazil...

Since among the HN users there are probably a lot of developers, I tried to
put some of the IPs into my browser. And indeed, already the second IP I tried
sent back a reply from a (misconfigured) server.

I have to say it feels frightening, that the other users can see my IP. And
probably other data about me.

Also I would expect it's not legal in most places around the world to give
away the IP of a visitor to other visitors. Can't imagine it is legal in
Europe.

~~~
tyingq
I agree that it's a bit frightening, but I would put that more on the browser
makers than sites in general.

The various browsers decided that webrtc (websockets as well) didn't need to
follow the "same origin" rules that they set up for XmlHttpRequest.

It almost feels like browsers should have some way to delineate "web pages"
from "web applications" and provide different ways to present them to end
users, different rules, etc.

~~~
TekMol
I think browsers should simply pop up a dialog "WebRTC Request: This website
wants to connect your computer to other computers. Allow?".

For now, I have disabled WebRTC in FireFox by setting
media.peerconnection.enabled to false in about:config.

~~~
tyingq
That seems to work for now, but I'm thinking more of where it's headed.
Websockets, WebRTC, WebWorkers, and then other pending proposals all
eventually end up being like a "VM" running apps on your local machine.

At some point, it's much closer to an "App Store", which arguably has finer
grained (and more usable) control presented to the user to manage what
applications can (and cannot) do.

------
redindian75
ISPs like Comcast have metered caps (1TB for our home).

So now it will require ~2x bandwidth (down/up) to watch the same content.
Basically shifting the content provider's CDN costs (which _we pay_
subscription for) on the backs of consumer's _metered_ internet? Seems like a
triple whammy for consumers.

Is your expectation/hope that they will share some of their cost savings?

~~~
developer2
From their FAQ[1]:

Q: Can Peer5 ever harm user experience?

A: No. Peer5 can never deteriorate user experience.

Q: How does Peer5 impact a user's upstream bandwidth?

A: Peer5 works with whatever bandwidth is free for upstream use and will not
impact other applications that require uploads at the same time as Peer5.
Changes to upstream bandwidth are unnoticeable to the end user.

\---

The concept is great, but until every consumer internet service comes with
unmetered bandwidth, this kind of peer-to-peer CDN must be treated as what it
is: a dark pattern from content providers who are looking to save their own
bottom line while directly harming their customers in the process.

For every $1 a content provider saves by using this service, their users who
happen to not have unmetered bandwidth will collectively pay dozens or
hundreds of times that cost in overage fees to their ISPs. The fact that any
business would use this technology and shrug their users' suffering off as an
externality is disgusting to me.

[1] [https://www.peer5.com/faq](https://www.peer5.com/faq)

~~~
detaro
> _A: Peer5 works with whatever bandwidth is free for upstream use and will
> not impact other applications that require uploads at the same time as
> Peer5._

That would also require WebRTC traffic to be properly tagged as low-priority
and general consumer gear being any good at QoS, neither of which is the case.
Of course parallel uploads can and will have a negative effect.

~~~
shacharz
Part of WebRTC's requirements [1] is to be fair on competing TCP connections.
This is a very good point, because I agree with you that in general parallel
connections cause each connection to have less throughput, but if those
connections have a mutual goal to download the same content it can actually
increase the overall throughput than downloading that content via a single TCP
connection. That's especially true when those connections are to different
sources which can workaround specific network issues you might have in a
single connection.

Actually the value proposition for our customers is to improve the QoS. And
we've shown that's the case in customer case studies.

[1] [https://wiki.tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-rtcweb-data-
chan...](https://wiki.tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-rtcweb-data-
channel-10#page-4)

------
niftich
Grats on your launch! I echo the sibling comment that was slightly faster in
asking about the disconnect between p2p companies and profitability. There has
been _no shortage_ of efforts that tried to capitalize (and monetize) on the
success of 'bandwidth sharing' that was perhaps brought to the forefront by
BitTorrent, although pioneered before by early p2p networks.

Most of these companies appear to have faltered, while a few of them were
bought out by big companies (example: [1][2]) and their technology has yet to
be conclusively observed in the wild. Yet another class continues to run their
offerings, but has drastically toned down marketing (example: [3]) There are
also a good number of non-commercial explorations in this space, of various
quality, from toys to demos to full-fledged networks. How do you plan to
distinguish yourself?

[1] [https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/17/yahoo-acquires-
peercdn/](https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/17/yahoo-acquires-peercdn/) [2]
[http://www.thesixthaxis.com/2013/03/14/microsoft-acquires-
pa...](http://www.thesixthaxis.com/2013/03/14/microsoft-acquires-pando-next-
xbox-uses-rumoured/) [3]
[http://www.bittorrent.com/dna/](http://www.bittorrent.com/dna/)

~~~
mino
I was about to write exactly the same comment myself. Also, let me add:

1) how does this work behind NAT?

2) as someone else pointed out already, your logo looks like a cheap ripoff of
HTML5 :)

Good luck.

~~~
shacharz
1\. WebRTC uses ICE[1] protocol to go over NAT and puncture Firwalls.

2\. HTML5 logo is under common license agreement and we give it attribution in
the /about page.

~~~
mino
1\. Thanks.

2\. Irrelevant: what tech people (i.e., the actual decision makers on becoming
your customer) will immediately think is "look they plagiarised HTML5's logo",
not "let me go through their site to see whether there's attribution" :)

------
chrissnell
This was done already, almost a decade ago. CNN.com used it and it was total
hell for us, running a corporate LAN, because it flooded out our upstream
bandwidth, especially when multiple people used it. Their product ended up
being considered, basically, as malware:

[https://arstechnica.com/business/2009/02/cnn-p2p-video-
strea...](https://arstechnica.com/business/2009/02/cnn-p2p-video-streaming-
tech-raises-questions/)

How are you going to stop people from starving out bandwidth in large offices?

~~~
shacharz
That's interesting, I know about Octoshape. But didn't know that in enterprise
they actually made matters worse. The way our technology works is a bit like
an 'onion' architecture. Users from the same corporation should communicate
only with each other - and actually reduce the traffic on their internet
connection - making the user experience better.

~~~
chrissnell
That's fantastic if that's the truth. I'm not sure how you deal with this. Big
corps have many subnets so you need a reliable way to figure out who's link-
local.

Octoshape really was a disaster. During a major news event, many hundreds of
employees could be live-streaming CNN and the effect was catastrophic.

------
mwseibel
Hey everyone - this is Michael Seibel - I'm one of the group partners for
Peer5 and I'm really excited they have launched. If you have any questions for
me - feel free to ask :)

~~~
sudosteph
I doubt you remember, but you responded very briefly to a YC application about
nearly the exact idea complete with prototype work a couple years back. Didn't
get any real interest or feedback from you though.

Has the game changed to make webrtc P2P platforms more palatable to VC (
_cough_ Trump = end of net neutrality _cough_ ) or did these guys just feel
like better "founder material" to y'all? I mean, we weren't ever going to
propose selling other's people bandwidth as a profit method for our tech, so
maybe that's the problem.

FWIW, we've since moved on to something better. Realized that VC shouldn't be
involved with every piece of tech, and that peer-distributed networks is
probably one of those. I'm sure you'll see it show up on HN before too much
longer though.

~~~
WhitneyLand
Glad your onto something better, but I think you know it's absolutely
unproductive to try an infer anything from any single VC decision, for a
variety of reasons.

To start they are wrong most of the time (just like we as entrepreneurs are
wrong most of the time). Most unicorns have investor rejection stories.

If they were not wrong and there was a flaw with your plan/product or team,
that kind of thing you can find out easily enough from people you trust and
respect, and who won't feel bad about damaging a potential future business
relationship.

~~~
sudosteph
I appreciate your response. You're 100% correct.

I was (and truthfully still am) a little bitter over the whole experience
(watching Silicon Valley for the first time was sort of a cathartic
experience). So many people seemed interested at first, but it was so hard to
get real feedback. Out of about 10 or so meetings, only one VC (depressingly
it was the very first one we met with) listened intently and asked good
questions. He gave great feedback but didn't want to pursue it because his
tech consultants didn't think WebRTC was mature enough to work as we
described. Every other time it was "Can you just go over the deck you sent 2
weeks ago? (which we did as they looked at their phones the entire time)" or
"Great, but can you make this more enterprise-y by adding SLAs? (yes, their
tech person asked if we could add enterprise SLAs to p2p video streaming)".

None of us were people with a wealthy or well-connected family, a degree from
an elite school or even from a state with much of a culture for
entrepeneurship or technology. So setting up meetings, building a deck and
pitching it, the whole thing felt so extremely foreign. What I would have
given for someone who we could trust or respect to give real feedback.

Nice thing about software though, as long as you have income to support
yourself and are adequately skilled at your craft, you can just build it
yourself. Which fortunately is the case here.

------
beardicus
"Why the hell is Chrome uploading and downloading so much data?"

* looks through open tabs *

"Oh."

Though most people would never notice, I feel like with developers (the folks
who will implement this on their sites) you may have a tough time convincing
them this is safe and ethical. I suggest being up front about this issue and
suggesting disclosure/consent strategies to any of your customers (and perhaps
doing research and surveys to prove that nobody really minds this use of their
bandwidth).

Also, it's kinda weird that you've appropriated the HTML 5 logo into your own.
That's probably within the logo's Creative Commons license, but I don't see
where you've given attribution as required by said license.

Slick page though, and a good informative site... I don't mean to be a downer.
Good luck!

~~~
shacharz
2 valid points

1\. We suggest a snippet today for our customers to notify their users.

2\. [https://www.peer5.com/about](https://www.peer5.com/about) towards the end
of the page you can see the attribution.

------
koolba
The pricing page says:

> Only data delivered via P2P counts against your plan.

Am I misunderstanding this or is that statement backwards?

Isn't the point of a P2P network to get the distributed network benefits of
your user base and if so why would I pay for that versus the data that's
coming directly off the primary channel?

~~~
einfach
I was going to ask the same thing. The Accounts & Billing FAQ does seem to
concur that you pay for P2P delivery:

> A: For the pay-per-Gigabyte tiers, Peer5 charges you at the end of the month
> based on the agreed upon price and actual amount of data delivered through
> our P2P CDN during the period. For the Pro tier, Peer5 bills the flat rate
> at the beginning of the month. For the free, Starter tier, there is no
> billing, but we do cap your P2P delivery at 1 TB per month.

~~~
shacharz
The point is that there's no double billing, http traffic is being billed by
your existing CDN. P2P traffic is billed by us.

------
bigbrooklyn
Congrats!

Maybe instead of or in addition to having users use their bandwidth, you can
partner with ISPs like netflix openconnect to deliver content

Unmetered networks - ISPs won't like you

Metered networks - users won't like you

Brace yourself

P.S. Did you know disabling WebRTC in chrome isn't natively supported ?

~~~
shacharz
Unmetered networks - ISP benefit from more local traffic and less traffic over
their peering agreements connections.

Metered networks -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13502790](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13502790)

TBH I didn't try to disable webrtc in chrome but there are extensions that do
that [1]

[1]
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/disable%20webrtc?h...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/disable%20webrtc?hl=en-
US)

~~~
bigbrooklyn
> Unmetered networks

> Metered networks

Cool! Does this mean all peer traffic is local ? Also, how can you detect when
traffic is metered ?

~~~
shacharz
traffic is as localized as possible. As a general rule you can think of, if
the peer is more local to you than the nearest CDN PoP you'll receive data
from the peer, otherwise you'll receive data from the CDN.

>Cool! Does this mean all peer traffic is local ? Also, how can you detect
when traffic is metered ?

We combine both client side and server side methods for that.

~~~
nix0n
> if the peer is more local to you

How is this determined? Just WebRTC ping?

------
kev009
This is cool from a philosophy of the internet angle. It's also one of the
worst workloads to try with P2P so it will be interesting to watch as a
business.

There are a number of fundamentally half-duplex technologies in widespread
use, such as wifi. Others have very different transmission characteristics,
for instance tx uses a second frequency on cellular but is obviously more
power hungry, whereas DOCSIS, wifi, and pretty much any radio network have
batching and even ack filtering that make ack clocking or even state of the
art things like BBR congestion control difficult. On "eyeball networks", ISPs
provision for downstream ratio and wholesale upload bandwidth to businesses as
transit. That may manifest as policy such as upload caps, or monetarily.
Drastically changing their network profile is more likely to result in hasty
policy and financial games rather than re-architecture or capacity expansion.

Also fundamentally, TCP is "easy" as a receiver and most stacks in common use
are good receivers. TCP as a sender is hard, and most stacks have a ways to
come, aside from sub-optimal defaults.

Hard problems. Doesn't mean there aren't simple solutions like aggressively
clamping where the tech is used. It also might spring the problem on other
people (ISPs, and I mean this non-condescendingly but end users) in a way that
is eventually a net win.

------
siscia
I was pondering to collaborate in a similar project and my main concern was
mobile bandwith use.

As a mobile user I would hate to have my data being use by some random
company...

It this address in some way?

~~~
shacharz
Right, that's a great point. We take into account whether your mobile device
is currently using Cellular or Wifi and make decisions based on that. (Today
Cellular devices would not be uploading at all, just leeching)

~~~
detaro
How about non-mobile devices? (Laptops tethered to phones, 3G-based Wifi-
hotspots, ...)

~~~
shacharz
Devices connected through another device still have the same external ip -
allowing us to detect it's indeed Cellular and not Wifi

------
zitterbewegung
How do you ensure that videos won't be modified by the users do you have an
integrity check ?

~~~
shacharz
Yes, we do hash verification of the fragments as they are received from users.

~~~
zitterbewegung
Could I perform a Sybil attack on the network?

~~~
shacharz
No, since the verification is done using signatures received from the server,
without any reputation system involved.

------
nl
It's a little amusing how we see many stories with comments begging for more
"decentralized platforms", and when one ships people go "wait.. they can see
my IP?".

------
jaypaulynice
This sounds like Red Swoosh, a company Travis Kalanick (Uber CEO) started and
was acquired by Akamai back in 2007. I was surprised that Akamai is a partner.
They already do that...

But anyways CDN is highly commoditized now and most big players are building
their own solutions. What advantage do you offer? It does not seem like it
would be a great solution for live streaming...

Also this sounds like a perfect target for DDoS attacks...

~~~
shacharz
Indeed Red Swoosh was probably one of the first P2P CDN companies, the main
difference from them is the underlying technology - WebRTC enabling a seamless
experience for the end user.

CDN is still a very expensive business to bootstrap and most companies in the
world rely on Akamai and Akamai like companies.

We provide a few advantages over a traditional CDN: 1\. Geographically
ubiquitous distribution - wherever there's demand, there's capacity.

2\. Improved user experience - since each user can download content both from
the existing CDN and multiple other peers it can fetch that content faster and
be less exposed to network conditions between it and the CDN's PoP

3\. Scale - CDNs as big as they are, even Akamai have a limit, and this
pronounces it self the most specifically in live events. Today's biggest live
events over the internet has been single digit million concurrent users and
they were using several CDNs at the same time. The potential of a P2P CDN is
to bring TV scale events to the internet.

Please elaborate how you think it can facilitate a DDoS?

------
ryanchan001
Hey guys! Your site looks awesome! Sorry for my noobness, but what is a
serverless CDN, who is it for, and why do I need it?

~~~
shacharz
Serverless CDN is the term we use to describe a CDN that uses no servers for
the content itself.

It's actually a Peer-to-Peer Content Delivery Network. Big content providers
(like Netflix, Youtube, ESPN) can use that to deliver their content more
efficiently and improve their users' experience. That results in less
rebuffering for their users and lower costs on infrastructure.

------
TekMol
You can turn a website visitor into a content delivery endpoint without them
even noticing? I find that hard to believe.

~~~
rkanter2
There are no downloads or plugins to make it work. All data moves through
WebRTC after just a 2 lines of js. Web pages enabled with Peer5 look exactly
the same as they did before it was implemented.

They could notice if monitoring upstream bandwidth, although this would be
absolutley negligible on Wifi connections.

~~~
TekMol
I did not expect that WebRTC would allow a website to make the browser deliver
content to a 3rd party without the users consent. This has some strange
privacy and copyright implications.

~~~
shacharz
That's a very much talked about subject in the standardization groups. They've
concluded that WebRTC doesn't add any additional privacy or security exposure
than what exists in the browsers previous to it. Can you please explain more
why you think there are copyright implications?

~~~
nolok
I'm not sure about the US, but in the EU and in particular in my country of
France, anti-piracy lawsuits have seen a very clearly drawn line between a
mere downloader, and an uploader. That's what lead emule and bittorrent to be
"dangerous" legally while direct downloading (newsgroup, rapidshare, ...) and
streaming almost never led to conviction (even symbolic). That the user didn't
realize his bittorrent was re-uploading content to others didn't matter.

So, if I visit a website to get, say, direct copyrighted content (let's say
photo, comics, music, whatever) and that website uses webrtc to make me
reshare it to other users, my legal status just went from a almost never
convicted downloader to a very much punished (even though it stayed symbolic,
it was still a legal loss) uploader.

~~~
shacharz
What's different in the CDN use-case is that the content that reached a 3rd
user through the uploading user would've reached the 3rd anyway, just from the
original server.

~~~
nolok
Yeah but from the point of view of the (unexpecting) uploader that doesn't
change anything. If user A wasn't uploading, user B would still get the files
from other peers on the torrent, doesn't change the fact A was sharing and
actively uploading the file.

Not trying to throw a wrench in your game, but I think this is something you
guys need to have a look into because you're turning unsuspecting users into
uploaders of content they have no control over, without noticing it, when it
has been proven to cause them legal harm.

~~~
shacharz
We're definitely looking into that, AFAIK for now, is that as long as the
content is legal there's no problem with uploading it.

------
woah
This reminds me of PeerCDN, which was acquired by Yahoo 4 years ago. One of
the founders, Feross, went on to build the excellent open source WebTorrent
library using many of the same technologies. Glad to see someone actually
doing this! How does it compare to PeerCDN?

~~~
shacharz
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13501923](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13501923)

------
divyahansg
How is this different from PeerCDN?

~~~
whadar
Hi, Hadar here, Co-founder and CEO of Peer5. PeerCDN started at about the same
time as Peer5 and was a competitor. Later it was acquired by Yahoo.

PeerCDN was a general purpose CDN, while Peer5 specializes in video. Feross,
one of PeerCDN's founders and author of WebTorrent actually became my friend
and we exchange ideas from time to time.

------
akhilcacharya
Out of curiosity, what is being used to have the dots on the globe in the
landing page? I've been trying to find out how to do this for a while, but I
don't know which libraries are designed for it.

~~~
shacharz
Hey, thanks we used three.js for it. We also wrote a blog post about how we
built it - [https://blog.peer5.com/peer5-live-
network/](https://blog.peer5.com/peer5-live-network/)

~~~
akhilcacharya
Excellent, thanks!

------
anilgulecha
Can I be bold and say: this is malware?

Any involuntary p2p, specially one that eats _heavily_ into a quota, can be
classified as malware. Is this a good criteria to ad-block the peer5 script
URLs?

~~~
huancle
Please note that Peer5's p2p is not involuntary. Peer5 is not the broadcaster
at the end of the day, our customers are. We work with our customers to notify
users that their use of streaming services on a particular site may entail
participation in p2p and to give them the appropriate opt-in or opt-our
mechanisms. Anyone who doesn't want to participate is not forced to.

------
csomar
Am I the only one who thinks that the video app should ask for my permission
before doing such a thing? Is this 1. ethical and 2. legal?

~~~
huancle
Yes, we agree with you that users should know that p2p is happening and that
they can opt out. We work with our customers to notify users and to give them
the appropriate opt-in or opt-our mechanisms.

------
EuAndreh
shacharz: Any plans of working with the IPFS team? They're solving many
similar problems, and they do have an js client.

~~~
shacharz
I just know about the IPFS team, but not familiar enough with their stuff.
From my experience usually a synchronization oriented distributed algorithm
can be very different from what a use-case like Video On Demand, or Live video
requires. In terms of chunk allocations, predictions of what's going to be
needed and so froth. But I definitely should familiarize myself more with
their stuff.

------
joemcelroy
Does it find the closest node to you? For live streaming, being close to a
source is important to us.

~~~
shacharz
Yes it does, there'll be other parameters but the main goal is to find the
nodes that'll help each other the most, and usually that'll be the closest
ones. Live streaming is the best use-case, where Peer5 has the most value to
give.

------
amelius
Is it possible to distribute videos in an encrypted form using this CDN?

~~~
shacharz
Yup, we support both AES-128 for HLS and any Common Encryption based DRM,
that's true because we're basically agnostic to the content it self we just
deliver it more efficiently.

------
bexp
Hi @shacharz do customers approve that his device would be used in p2p work ?
For example if I'm on cell network I don't want to server traffic to other
clients.

~~~
shacharz
We detect what network you're on, on a cellular network you wouldn't upload
and only leech from other users and http.

~~~
heywire
Are you able to do that if the user is connected to a VPN? I frequently
connect to a work VPN on my laptop using my phone as a hotspot.

~~~
shacharz
That's an interesting scenario, we didn't consider it but we can include it as
well.

