Swarmcast is a provider of Internet television

Internet television

Internet television is the digital distribution of television content via the Internet...

 service. It is headquartered in Minneapolis and Tokyo

Tokyo

, ; officially , is one of the 47 prefectures of Japan. Tokyo is the capital of Japan, the center of the Greater Tokyo Area, and the largest metropolitan area of Japan. It is the seat of the Japanese government and the Imperial Palace, and the home of the Japanese Imperial Family...

 with branch offices in Zurich

Zürich

Zurich is the largest city in Switzerland and the capital of the canton of Zurich. It is located in central Switzerland at the northwestern tip of Lake Zurich...

, San Francisco and New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

. It employs approximately 50 people.

History

Swarmcast the company was founded in 2001 by Justin Chapweske under the name Onion Networks. Swarmcast was originally the name of an innovative peer-to-peer software product developed by Opencola

Opencola (company)

OpenCola was a Toronto-based software company founded in 1999 by Grad Conn, Cory Doctorow and John Henson to create "collaboration object lookup architecture" software, and sold in 2003. The software and specifications produced were all released as open source...

 in the Java

Java (programming language)

Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...

 programming language. The Swarmcast software introduced an early bittorrent

BitTorrent

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol used for distributing large amounts of data over the Internet. BitTorrent is one of the most common protocols for transferring large files, and it has been estimated that it accounted for roughly 43% to 70% of all Internet traffic .Programmer...

-like transfer protocol, with the intention to provide content creators with more control over the distribution of their product than was permitted by other P2P protocols at the time.

In 2006 the company received $5 million of investment capital and in 2007 relaunched as Swarmcast to focus on Internet television. Client Major League Baseball

Major League Baseball

Major League Baseball is the highest level of professional baseball in the United States and Canada, consisting of teams that play in the National League and the American League...

 has used its Mosaic

Mosaic

Mosaic is the art of creating images with an assemblage of small pieces of colored glass, stone, or other materials. It may be a technique of decorative art, an aspect of interior decoration, or of cultural and spiritual significance as in a cathedral...

 product, which offered viewers simultaneous access to video feeds from four baseball games.

Technology overview

Swarmcast’s video delivery platform, the Autobahn Platform, uses adaptive bitrate streaming

Streaming media

Streaming media is multimedia that is constantly received by and presented to an end-user while being delivered by a streaming provider.The term "presented" is used in this article in a general sense that includes audio or video playback. The name refers to the delivery method of the medium rather...

, encode

Encode

Encode may refer to:* Can be related to "Code"* Encode ApS, a Danish software company* Encode SA, a Greek information security company* ENCODE, the ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements...

s at many different bitrate

Bitrate

In telecommunications and computing, bit rate is the number of bits that are conveyed or processed per unit of time....

s, and switches bitrates as a user's network conditions change. It uses HTTP for video streaming, and can talk to Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 Silverlight and Adobe Systems

Adobe Systems

Adobe Systems Incorporated is an American computer software company founded in 1982 and headquartered in San Jose, California, United States...

 Flash

Adobe Flash

Adobe Flash is a multimedia platform used to add animation, video, and interactivity to web pages. Flash is frequently used for advertisements, games and flash animations for broadcast...

.

Early versions of Chapweske’s technology were based on peer-to-peer

Peer-to-peer

Peer-to-peer computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads among peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application...

data transfer techniques, but today Swarmcast does not utilize any form of P2P data transfer.