Wikipedia has been pushing video content for the past few months encouraging contributors to add video data to entries. It recently rolled out a HTLM5 video editor for use on the site.
Apparently, Wikipedia's actions proved successful, so much so that the site is now worrying about the all the bandwidth video content eats up.
"As Wikimedia and the community embark on campaigns and programs to increase video contribution and usage on the site, we are starting to see video usage on Wikimedia sites to grow and we hope for it to grow a great deal more," Wikimedia's Michael Dale
wrote on the foundation's Tech Blog.
"One potential problem with increased video usage on the Wikimedia sites is that video is many times more costly to distribute than text and images that make up Wikipedia articles today," he said.
"Eventually bandwidth costs could saturate the foundation budget or leave less resources for other projects and programs," he added.
Wikimedia is now experimenting with a peer-2-peer solution to distribute video content. P2P-Next is a group funded by the EU which aims to lower the cost of online video distribution.
The group has created a Firefox add-on, Swarmplayer 2.0, which is being made available today. The add-on uses BitTorrent for peer-2-peer distribution. An IE version is in the works.
Wikimedia, the foundation behind Wikipedia, has enabled support for the add-on on its sites, including Wikipedia. This means that every video viewed from one of those sites will be streamed via BitTorrent as well as a regular HTTP connection.
The video is then stored locally and is made available via BitTorrent to other Swarmplayer users. The advantage of this is that it keeps bandwidth costs down for hosts and it may result in higher speeds for viewers in some cases, if the video is popular enough.
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