Browser to browser media streaming with HTML5

Abstract

Video on demand services generate one of the largest portions of Internet traffic every day and their use is constantly increasing. Scaling up the infrastructure to meet this demand with the current model of Internet video delivery over HTTP, is proving to be very costly for service providers. An alternative model for video content delivery is the need of the hour to meet this challenge. Peer-to-peer streaming is a viable alternative model that is highly scalable and can meet this increasing demand. The emerging HTML5 standard introduces APIs that give Web browsers the ability to communicate directly with each other in real-time. This also allows web browsers to behave as Peer-to-peer nodes. In this thesis, we utilize these new APIs to develop a Video on demand service within the Web browser. The goal of this being to determine the feasibility of such a solution and evaluate the usage of these APIs. We hope to aid the HTML standardization process with our findings.