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

Duration: NaN:NaN:NaN

Speaker: Levente Bence Kiss

Type: Talk

Expertise: Some familiarity with the topic

Event: Devcon

Date: Nov 2026

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.