Decentralized video streaming: architecture, performance, and trade-offs

Video is where decentralized storage claims get tested: tight latency budgets, chunked retrieval at scale, and viewers who notice every rebuffer. We pushed real HLS video through Swarm's content-addressed chunks, load-tested the result, and measured quality of experience instead of asserting it.

We will cover:

- Why video is the hard case for decentralized storage: retrieval latency, chunking, and buffering under load

- The architecture: HLS over Swarm chunks, the retrieval path, and the Swarmcast design direction

- The measurements: the load-testing setup, a live QoE overlay, and results, including what does not hold up yet

- Transcoding on decentralized infrastructure

- What "survives when the network layer is hostile" means concretely for a media pipeline

The findings transfer to any content-addressed network, and the timing matters: streaming is how the world consumes information, and nearly all of it still hangs off seizable origins. Field notes, not a pitch.

Speakers: Levente Bence Kiss

Track: Permissionless Networks