Launch HN: Peer5 (YC W17) – Serverless CDN (opens in new tab)

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.

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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

Rural Australia here. 40gb satellite limit each month, uploads are counted. Everything we do has to be decided to be "worth it" when you have ~1Gb/day. No YouTube (no video in general unless really needed), no big images. Data is precious and expensive here.

I really doubt these guys are doing any effort in working with my tiny rural ISP. Nor would my or any satellite ISP ignore uploads because some US startup asked them to (they won't even unmeter any content for us like bigger ISPs do).

Something like this would destroy my quota, and I'd treat it as hostile like malware running background torrents or background software updates that don't prompt you (PS4 used my entire quota in one day once, while it was turned off.. that's how I learnt about PS4 standby mode updates! We had no net for nearly a month after that).

No, we're not expecting the consumer to pay for the upload bandwidth. We're working with ISPs to not charge consumer for Peer5's upload traffic.

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.

Has there ever been a business with significant commercial success that designed a peer to peer architecture to serve as the foundation of it's technology or IP?

I can only think of one, that being Skype. Of course that doesn't mean Peer5 can't do it, and I sincerely hope they do because I always root for entrepreneurs.

However there seems to be this weird disconnect between p2p architectures and profitable companies, even though the theory is so powerful. I can only guess as to why:

- The illegal stuff has somehow unfairly tarnished public opinion

- It's too low level and is only suitable for standards like WebRTC where lots of people buy in at once to provide enough momentum

- It's not easy to do right

How do you evaluate something like this at YC? Do you bring experts in the field or is the decision based on team, idea, and traction?

Use some other poor rube's bandwidth; sell it as your own. Brilliant!

Presumably the more traffic the P2P stuff serves, the more value it brings you (in saved CDN costs), and of course Peer5 would like to be paid as much as possible of that. Being paid by the same measure the thing you are replacing is commonly billed by seems sensible.

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.

The idea is that you're not double taxed. If you're using a CDN already like Akamai for instance, you wouldn't pay Peer5 for the HTTP bytes. Only Akamai would charge you for that.

the more they get onto p2p the more money they make.

And the more is on p2p the faster stuff gets delivered and the happier the users are.

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.

When a user access any website of content providers online, they implicitly agree to the terms of service of that provider. When using Peer5, the terms of service includes a language about public IP temporarily visible to other users.

IP addresses are not secret anyway.

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.

Disable WebRTC on corporate computers? I'm assuming Peer5's solution falls back to servers when the browser doesn't support WebRTC.

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.

For PeerCDN checkout [1].

What differentiates our solution from previous P2P services like BTDNA, Pando is the underlying technology stack - WebRTC, that eliminates the number 1 barrier - user needed to download and install a plugin. From the research we've done by talking with all of those previous solution was that was their number 1 barrier.

Our goal is to improve video user experience, and enable the full transition of TV to the web.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13501923

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)

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

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...

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

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.

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/

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

2 valid points

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

2. https://www.peer5.com/about towards the end of the page you can see the attribution.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.