• Current Issue • Ad. Rates • Writer's Guidelines • Archives • Circulation

Minnesota Technology Magazine - Winter 2007

Stream Team

Minneapolis-based Swarmcast is staking its future on an innovative file-download technology. Is this the future of video entertainment?

—Sara Aase

Justin Chapweske’s name is still best known among fellow tech nerds, but that may change if the new highdefinition streaming video technology developed by his Minneapolis company, Swarmcast, takes off. “We’re providing a technology that allows a TV-quality user experience delivered over broadband,” Chapweske says.

In other words, no more herky-jerky streamed Webinars or Daily Show clips. And no more endless waits for large videos or other files to download, only to discover that they somehow got mangled during the transfer. The technology is called “swarmstreaming,” and essentially works by making the video viewer’s computer a part of the Internet “engine” that powers the download. “[Traditionally,] if I’m watching a video on NBC.com, a single server is streaming that data to me,” Chapweske says. “For small pages or a short amount of transfer time, that’s fine.”

But if a certain video is in high demand, or if it’s a large, fulllength Hollywood movie, for example, that single connection to the end user’s computer can quickly break down. “If there’s any problem along the way, such as a server that goes down or too much demand on the connection, it creates a bottleneck—like a block in a hose,” he explains. “Our technology is like having multiple hoses hooked up and all converging to that one end user. We blend streams from multiple networks at one time to get the highest-quality playback.”

Swarmstreaming is itself a takeoff on “swarming,” a technology for more efficiently downloading large files that Chapweske invented in 1999. Based on the concept of file sharing, a swarm-enabled download instead breaks one file into many pieces. Each user gets a complete copy of the file, but as more users connect to the original server, they in turn share pieces with others, lessening the demand on the original server and speeding up everyone’s connection. Chapweske sold his swarming technology in 2000 to a Toronto-based company called OpenCola, and then bought it back in 2003 when that firm failed. In the meantime, Chapweske’s company focused on developing swarmstreaming and other technologies to help move large amounts of data.

Late last year, Swarmcast raised $5 million in venture capital from Japanese investors in order to deliver swarmstreaming to more of its customers, such as multimedia providers, in 2007. Japan is an obvious market for Swarmcast, Chapweske says, since its mature broadband connections and consumer electronics make it one of the first places where watching full-fledged movies online will become commonplace. “We’re still in the early stages,” he says. “But I have 100 percent confidence that Internet distribution of high-definition video will supplant traditional cable and over-the-air distribution. It’s the way of the future of video entertainment.”