Frequently Asked Questions
April 7th, 2009
Basics
How does this thing work?
You install the sidecar, click on the video you want to download, and the sidecar downloads it for you to watch. Since there are no file size limits, the videos are often high-definition.
When you want to share something with others, you click on "My Shares," then "Share a file," choose the file, attach a thumbnail and description, and anyone can then download it. You can optionally make the file private, and grant access solely to people you choose. You can specify these people by their user name on the site, or by their email address.
What's karma (
)?
Karma is a measure of how nice a user you have been. Every user starts out with an initial karma purse, sufficient to download many hours of video. Downloading blocks of a movie costs a user karma, while uploading blocks brings in karma. You will gain karma as you cache and provide files with other users, while you will consume karma to download files. You can see your current karma balance under your profile page.
What happens if I run out of karma?
If you run out of karma, you will still be able to download files, except your requests will have lower priority compared to folks with positive karma balances. Consequently, once you reach zero karma, your download speeds will suffer. To gain karma and get back to normal, increase your upload capacity and leave your sidecar running -- you'll get more karma as people download blocks from you. Another way to gain karma is to share a file that is featured on the front page. If your file is so highly rated and so well-liked that it becomes featured, we automatically reward you with fresh karma.
What are these stars (
) and bars (
) ?
The stars indicate the users' rating for that item. The highest attainable rating is 5 stars. Items with sufficiently many votes, very high ratings, and high downloads are eligible for being featured on the front page.
The bars indicate the estimated health of the file. Files with five bars are widely cached and can be downloaded very quickly, while files with a single bar have few caches and may be slow to download as a result. Shared items with zero cached copies pose a problem: you may want to send a note to the content owner to run the sidecar and put the copy on the network again, otherwise your downloads may not make progress.
Technology
How is FlixQ different from YouTubeTM, HuluTM, NetFlixTM and any of the other services that let you download videos?
We differ in our underlying technology and in the way our service operates. Many commercial services are closed systems, where the content offered by the service is fixed by the operator, whereas our service is open, as it enables any user anywhere to share videos. Almost all commercial services are based on a client-server architecture, where all content is hosted at a datacenter by the operator and each client needs to fetch it over a bottleneck link to that datacenter.
In contrast, our technology enables users to fetch the content from other nearby users who also have the same content, sidestepping the bottleneck and dramatically increasing download speeds. Further, "uploading" a movie to our service is instantenous, as the movie does not have to be copied to our datacenter (yet our system is clever enough to pull copies into our datacenters automatically as items become popular). Finally, because we make efficient use of resources distributed around the network, running our service is much cheaper than running one of these traditional client-server services.
How is FlixQ different from BitTorrent, Pirate Bay, and any of the other peer-to-peer content sharing systems?
BitTorrent is a completely decentralized protocol used in underground sharing networks. As a BitTorrent user, you may have noticed a few phenomena that are all symptoms of the same underlying problem, namely, the protocol is designed solely to be difficult to shut down, not to facilitate fast, efficient sharing. Since each BitTorrent participant is acting alone and without coordination, the emergent swarm behavior provides no guarantees -- the swarm may be ok, or it may be way too slow. It may be that if some peers were to modify their behavior slightly, life would be much better for everyone, but there is no entity in a position of control to affect such change. There is no accounting in BitTorrent: the distributor has only a loose idea of which nodes are participating in the network, and getting an accurate tally of which nodes downloaded which file is difficult. Despite the much touted "tit-for-tat" algorithm to deter freeriders, BitTorrent is highly prone to abuse by participants with modified/hacked clients who degrade performance for everyone else. And you may have noticed that mid-size to small swarms degrade rapidly, and less popular swarms quickly disappear -- BitTorrent just does not work well when the content is not very popular.
In contrast, our underlying protocol, called AntFarm, is a hybrid; it combines BitTorrent-like peer-to-peer transfers with a logically centralized coordinator. The coordinator acts like an omniscient maestro, checking the health of each swarm, and providing resources to each group of users such that the benefits to the overall network are maximized. For any given amount of resources, AntFarm is optimal; that is, in a fair comparison, it is impossible for other protocols to outperform our download speeds! (Note to our network-savvy early adopters: hey, we reserve the right to have bugs in our NAT-traversal code! We try to fix those as soon as you all report them). AntFarm servers are cheaper to run than client-server datacenters and more effective at delivering bits than BitTorrent seeders. The protocol also provides the operator with statistics and accounting, so the download process is not an uncontrolled free-for-all, but is instead an engineered, manageable process.
What is this Flash conversion option that I see when I upload files? Do you support other file formats besides Flash?
Our software gives you the option to convert your media files to Flash format prior to uploading them, so downloaders can watch your movies in their browsers without having to configure any special software. It turns out that many people, especially less sophisticated users, do not have their media player set up properly to view raw media files, so the conversion to Flash makes your videos accessible to a broader audience. The conversion step is optional, so if you like, you can just skip this step and share video files directly, though for the convenienve of people who will be downloading from you, we highly recommend that you perform a Flash conversion. We plan to support Ogg/Theora in the near future, when the built-in browser players for this format become sufficiently sophisticated to support our feature set.
I run an ISP and would like to reduce my bandwidth costs. Is there anything I can do?
Yes, you can deploy one of our caching servers. These maintenance-free boxes can dramatically reduce an ISP's ingress/egress bandwidth costs. Please contact us and a member of our technical staff will get in touch with you.
Content
Is this service solely for sharing videos? Can I share other files?
You can share anything you like as long as you do not violate our terms of service. We initially intended the site to be solely for sharing videos, so you'll find a lot of language targeted at video sharing. But as we were building the site, we discovered that we would often take lots of digital pictures, especially when friends came by to visit. Modern cameras take large pictures, and sharing them with friends was incredibly difficult, so we now support sharing any kind of file.
What will happen to the content that I place on your service? Will you guys pull some weird legal shenanigans to claim ownership of my videos/content?
The content you share through our service belongs to you. You hold all rights and responsibilities associated with whatever you share. We are happy working as a conduit, and are not interested in owning your content or in any way becoming liable for whatever you may have done! To be able to effectively deliver your bits, we need certain limited rights; these are specified in detail in our Terms of Service.
I deleted a video. Do you guys keep a copy forever?
No. Our disks are expensive and we'd much rather delete your dead content and use that space to help distribute content that people actually want. As soon as you delete your content, no new users can download it from our site. And shortly after you delete your content, we'll get rid of all copies on any caches we operate. Note that there is some CYA language in our terms of service, as there are some impossibility results regarding distributed systems. For instance, some of the cache nodes might be down or unreachable at the time of your deletion, in which case, the delete will take place after they come back online. The content cannot be deleted from any of your friends' machines who already downloaded it, so be careful what you make available online, and to whom.
I am a privacy-minded individual. Do you guys build a profile of my web browsing habits? Can someone subpeona my activity records on your website? Can they get a list of everything I have downloaded?
No. We do not keep such records. We provide a strong privacy guarantee.
Technology
What is required to use FlixQ?
Our service currently runs on Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Mac OSX. You'll need a recent version of the Adobe Flash plugin to play videos.
Our service relies on resources contributed by peers. Our client installs a daemon that waits for requests for content served by your machine, and responds to it in the background. We are very respectful of resource consumption on the clients: you can pause the client at any time, and set the uplink bandwidth speed to any value you like.
Is this a "tit-for-tat" system? Am I required to upload as many bytes as I download?
No, not at all. You can set your resource contribution level to whatever you like. If you choose to set your upload speed to zero, that is perfectly fine with us, as our technology will just detect and automatically adapt to the level of resources available from all peers. Keep in mind, though, that you will be able to download at higher speeds the more karma you have and the higher your upload cap is.
Do you use my machine to serve content that I did not download? Is my machine participating in transferring unrelated content that has nothing to do with me?
No. The only content your machine serves to other peers is content that you previously downloaded. Your machine is never used without your permission for other purporses.
I'm behind a NAT. Can I use your service?
Yes, our client performs automatic NAT punching.
I'm behind a corporate firewall, or other similar network device that prohibits peers from providing peer-assist. Can I use your service?
Yes, our protocol will use a middlebox to rendezvous with peers, so you can both download to and share content from the host behind the firewall.
Policy Issues
What do you think about the DMCA or some other copyright-related law?
We think just what you'd expect a bunch of high-tech people to think about the DMCA and copyright law. However, our thoughts on the DMCA are not really germane, as we all need to obey the law of the land, even as we strive to change parts of it that do not make sense. So, this is not a service for distributing pirated content. We have processes in place to comply with DMCA notices from copyright owners.
What do you think about Freedom of Speech? Can I use your service to share any video I like?
Not surprisingly, we believe in it. We also believe in cultivating a positive user community. Defamation, harassment, false light, or otherwise being a nuisance form no part of such a community. So play nice -- do not share videos or other content that would pose a nuisance for any third party. Be sure to mark content as "mature" if it has elements that are not acceptable for a general audience. And keep in mind that we reserve the right to pull any content and ban any user at any time for any reason or no reason at all.
Does the rise of services and protocols like yours just reshuffle the cost of operating a datacenter to the ISPs?
No. Our protocol does defray the costs of content distribution away from centralized datacenters, but it simultaneously reduces total costs for everyone and provides ways for ISPs to reduce their expenses at the same time. For ISPs, the total bandwidth distribution costs of our system are drastically lower compared to client-server approaches. Further, we provide ISP caches to further reduce the ISP ingress bandwidth costs. For content owners, especially those with large content libraries, our approach provides the lowest-cost method for distributing multimedia.
Company
Are you hiring?
Yes. We're a highly tech-oriented startup, staffed and run by techies. We welcome resumes from individuals with a strong systems programming background. Contact us here.