Hey All,

Thanks for looking at the Mac installer. We’re very pleased to announce that we now officially support OS X. All of you that have been so patiently waiting for the Autobahn video experience, you can check it out on http://www.swarmcast.com

There are more updates to come in the very near future, so stay tuned.

Best,

John

Internally a large fraction of our developers work on Macs, so we’ve had a Mac version since day-one, but the installer has always been lagging. Part of that was market forces and customers requiring the Windows installer first and part of that was the Mac experience being so generally smooth that a clumsy installer really sticks out like a sore thumb.

We’ve now got two separate Mac installers, one that runs in-browser and one that’s a traditional .dmg style. We’re beta-ing the in-browser experience first because our customers have expressed a preference for it, but I’m sure you’ll see both before too long.

For now, if interested Mac owners could try out http://beta.swarmcast.com/showcase/ and let us know how it works we’d certainly appreciate it. We’ve run this thing a few thousand times internally and haven’t seen any system-damaging behaviors, nor do we have any reason to suspect some might exist, but as always do take the usual precautions when running any new software.

Feedback is greatly appreciated either in the forums or at our support (at) getautobahn (dot) com address.

*Autobahn HD for OS X coming soon . . .

At Swarmcast, our focus has always been to provide the best online video user experiences while solving the economics of video delivery. It is thus with great pride that we unveil the beta release of Autobahn HD for Flash.

The demand for high quality online video is undeniable. However, content providers are being held back by available players and delivery methods that lack the flexibility and expressive power to support innovative and profitable business models for online video.

Autobahn HD for Flash is the first ever FREE video player platform to feature network acceleration, protect against rebuffering, and ensure that every viewer receives the best video quality, every time.

Developers can get the open code to create or customize their own embeddable, full-screen video player. The Flash platform combined with Autobahn HD will always deliver the best possible user experience.

Developers - get the player source code

To learn more about how Autobahn HD for Flash works, see the posts below.

To support you in showcasing high quality video on your site, for a limited time we’re offering a risk-free hosting trial. That’s right – you use our player or integrate Autobahn HD into your Flash player, and we’ll foot the bill for delivery from several of the top CDNs in the world. You are not required to use our delivery for Autobahn HD, but many CDNs are always faster than one, so why not give it a try.

Please join me in spreading the word about Autobahn HD. I can’t wait to see what new experiences we can bring to online video.

Best,

Justin Chapweske

CEO and Founder

Hello All,

In an effort to spread the gospel about the importance of user experience as regards Internet video, we’ve submitted a panel topic for South by Southwest Interactive 2008. Panels are voted on by the web community at large through the South by Southwest Panel Picker, and those that receive the most votes will be selected for the SXSW Interactive 2008.

Please take a moment and go to the SXSW 2008 Panel Picker, and cast a vote of confidence in our vision of faster downloads, better video streaming, and higher quality Internet video. You need to be logged in to vote, but the login process is painless. If you don’t see our panel topic right away, just search for Swarmcast.

Cheers,

John

Hey All,

It’s been a while since an update, and that’s because we’ve been working hard on releasing some cool stuff on the B2B side of things.  The result is our multi-source approach to live streaming, called Swarmcast Live.

Swarmcast Live enables the reliable distribution of HD-quality, high-action live streaming video. The Swarmcast Live solution works seamlessly with content providers’ existing Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems, and can easily integrate with a host of media player technologies.

Swarmcast Live is ideal for live sports, TV and concerts, and scales to accommodate high-quality video delivery to global audiences.  There’s a lot of really cool live content out there that could find a ready audience on the Internet, and Swarmcast Live is a solution that will allow content owners to reliable stream that video in high-quality.

Here’s the full press release on Swarmcast Live.

Cheers,

John

Hello All,

As you saw below, Autobahn is able to get some really fast download rates, in that particular case, on Comcast.

A very cool thing that these high download speeds enables is the ability to watch the movies you buy through iTunes within a minute or two after you begin the download. Because Autobahn Accelerator for iTunes maximizes your incoming broadband, you get consistently fast download speeds, allowing playback very quickly.

As you can see in this screen shot, with iTunes’ estimate of 57 minutes of download time remaining, I could begin watching the very excellent movie “Chinatown” with only about 4% of the movie downloaded. Instead of waiting for 57 minutes to watch, I started viewing the movie in about 2 minutes. To see full image, click the thumbnail below . . .

To do this when you download a movie, purchase your movie, and after the download is initiated, click on the “Movies” button in iTunes. Pretty quickly after the download has begun, the movie info will show up and you can click on your movie and play it.

One small disclaimer : If your PC is a bit older, the video may stutter on playback. In that case, you may wish to wait until the video is completely downloaded to start watching it.

Happy downloading - and most importantly, happy viewing!

Cheers,

John

Hello All,

In doing some testing at the HQ, we took a couple of screen shots to illustrate the type of download speeds that Autobahn helps achieve. In one of our test setups we’ve got a standard, consumer Comcast connection, which they recently gussied up with speed burst capability.

One of the cool things that we noticed is that with Autobahn running, we were able use that speed burst consistently to hit an incredible 25 Mbps download speed multiple times over the duration of video downloads. That’s over 6x Comcast’s regular download speed.

To give some perspective, with 25 Mbps, you could stream 20 simultaneous broadcast quality videos, or 4 simultaneous HD quality videos.

This first graph shows network utilization while we downloaded “The 3 Musketeers”, a 1.2 GB feature length movie, using Autobahn. Each vertical line on the graph represents 6 seconds, and the download was completed in just 9 minutes and 18 seconds. Click to see the full image . . .

Additionally, here’s a network graph showing a download of one of our favorites, “Chappelle’s Show.” On the left is a download with Autobahn running - you can see that it hits peaks of 25 Mbps. On the right is a download without Autobahn, which maxed out at under 5 Mbps and took a great deal longer to download. Click to see the full image . . .

Autobahn lets users get the most out of their broadband connection, and shows the potential for speed and video quality over the Internet. So, what’s the max speed you’ve a seen on your connection?

We got some excellent feedback after yesterday’s announcement, but there were a lot of people asking exactly how we speed up your iTunes downloads. The short answer is that we make multiple, parallel connections back to the iTunes music store for each download.

A single TCP connection, no matter how wide the pipe, hits startlingly low theoretical throughput limits with just a little bit of packet loss or latency. Creating multiple connections back to iTunes allows Autobahn to overcome those limitations and allow your downloads to approach the inbound maximum on your last mile.

Creating multiple connections does not increase the total bandwidth load on Apple, it just condenses one user’s same number of downloaded bytes into a narrower time window. Even if everyone downloading from iTunes used Autobahn Accelerator, Apple wouldn’t spend a penny more on bandwidth rate in Gbps wouldn’t increase. We’re able to accelerate iTunes downloads without any server side support because they were already 100% standard HTTP.

As to who should expect to see acceleration, the short answer is: everyone. International and high latency users can see dramatic improvement — with these techniques we’ve seen as fast as 30x increases for some locations in Australia. WiFi can also be a considerable contributor to packet loss and latency. You’re going to get the best performance with Autobahn on a wired connection, but this will also improve performance over wireless noticeably.