Viblast announced recently that it had created the world’s first peer-to-peer (P2P) capable HTML5 DASH/HLS player, Viblast PDN. It offers an efficient delivery mechanism that does not require plugins, can be invoked with one line of code, and claims to be 70 percent more efficient.

Sofia, Bulgaria-based Viblast Ltd. develops video player solutions. The original player, the Viblast Player is a basic player that uses HTML5’s <video> tag (News – Alert) to deliver HTTP live streaming (HLS) or DASH video. The Viblast PDN solution is better for video solutions that need to support multiple concurrent users.

The P2P support of Viblast PDN is what makes streaming more efficient. The best visualization of how this works is to picture a hub and spoke arrangement with a server in the middle, video displays or clients on the outside, and with spokes representing the connections.

In a server-to-client model, video streams travel from the server to the client through the connections. This works fine until demand increases significantly to the point of making the server bog down as it tries to deliver video to everyone demanding it.

If you take that same hub and spoke architecture and split the clients up into groups, and add connections so that all the clients in a group can connect with each other, then you have the P2P architecture that Viblast PDN can leverage to improve performance.

When a client in a group is first to request a video stream, the primary stream comes from the server to the client.  However, when an additional client requests the same video stream at the same time, it doesn’t get it from the server; it gets the stream from the first client in the group. So do any other subsequent clients requesting the same stream.

Assuming that all clients in the same group are physically close to each other, this performs much more efficiently than a server-to-client model. The server doesn’t get tied up so badly and the secondary streams don’t have to travel so far to get to the remaining clients. Viblast therefore recommends its PDN player for environments where peers are close together and that are not using video-on-demand setups.

Viblast has developed a video solution in the PDN player that makes it well-suited for many multi-user environments.  It would be useful for meetings where attendees come from various branch offices or educational solutions where students in the same area are likely to access the same video streams at the same time. It may not solve all video problems, but if its claims of 70 percent more efficiency are true, a lot of people will line up to buy it.