Typical websites are based on a client-server architecture. They own the servers. You are the client. If you want to put up a video, you have to painfully and slowly transfer your video upstream to them so they can serve it to other users.

Uploading videos is a very slow process. The longer, bigger and higher-definition your video is, the longer it takes.

The situation is even worse from the point of view of the website operator. They need to pay to store your videos, so they end up placing stringent limits on the length, size and quality of the videos. The videos you download end up looking fuzzy and blocky.

And because the clients are served by one website, that website ends up being stuck with incredibly high operational costs for bandwidth, disk maintenance, machines, power and cooling.

Our service relies instead on a hybrid architecture. The content that a client retrieves can come not only from our website, but also from various content caches we have distributed around the world, as well as other clients who have previously downloaded that content.

There is no lengthy upload phase. A client will be getting pieces of the file from the originator, as well as any other peers that have pieces of the same file. In addition, we automatically cache the files around the network in response to demand, and these high-speed caches also assist in the downloads.

And here comes the special sauce: we carefully manage the nodes so that the delivery of content is optimal. For any given amount of resources, no other protocol can deliver video as fast as we can. We achieve this by having a central coordinator carefully choose a data delivery schedule. The coordinator determines how each server, cache node and client needs to behave at each time step for the content to be distributed as fast as possible. This algorithm and its implementation are responsible for the performance of our website.

Security and privacy are issues we take seriously. You can share your videos with just your friends if you like. They will not be made public.

That's the short and quick summary of what makes us different. If you're interested in finding out more, feel free to contact us.