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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

TorrentFreak reports on WebTorrent, a project using BitTorrent and WebRTC [torrentfreak.com] to transport files:

WebTorrent [webtorrent.io] is a project launched by Feross Aboukhadijeh, a Stanford University graduate who has already booked quite a few successes in his career. After graduating he founded PeerCDN, a P2P-assisted content delivery network, which was sold to Yahoo at the end of 2013. Feross [feross.org] then focused on WebTorrent, convinced that it could revolutionize how the web works today.

"I felt that the idea of 'people-powered websites' – websites that are hosted by the visitors who use them – was too revolutionary to keep locked up as proprietary software, and I wanted to do more to push the idea forward," he tells TF. "Imagine a video site like YouTube, where visitors help to host the site's content. The more people that use a WebTorrent-powered website, the faster and more resilient it becomes."

[...] "WebTorrent is the first torrent client built for the web. It's written completely in JavaScript – the language of the web – and uses WebRTC for true peer-to-peer transport. No browser plugin, extension, or installation is required," Feross tells TF.

Over the past two years WebTorrent has matured into a project that's slowly starting to win over several major tech companies. Netflix, for example, contacted Feross to discuss his technology which they may use to stream their videos. A few months ago Netflix specifically mentioned WebTorrent in a job application [torrentfreak.com], which shows that the video giant is serious about P2P-assisted delivery.

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Feross believes that companies such as Netflix could benefit greatly from WebTorrent. Currently, streaming performance goes down during peak hours but with WebTorrent this shouldn't be a problem.

[...] Netflix aside, there are already various noteworthy implementations of WebTorrent. The project's homepage [webtorrent.io], for example, shows how easily it can stream video and βTorrent [btorrent.xyz] offers a fully functioning torrent client UI.

Other examples include File.pizza [file.pizza], which uses WebTorrent to share files in the browser. The same technology is used for server-less websites by PeerCloud [github.com] and Webtorrentapp [github.com], while GitTorrent [printf.net] uses it to decentralize source control.

In addition to the examples above, the Internet Archive is also looking into the technology for its video distribution, and another major tech company is considering adding WebTorrent support to their web browser.

Original Submission