Sia, a decentralized blockchain storage platform, announced today the addition of a streaming endpoint. Users can now stream their favorite content from a fast, cost-effective and fully decentralized network.
Prior to this, Sia could only be used to store files but there is a lot more potential to it. The Sia team affirms that streaming is just the first step towards a much bigger picture. And it proves that decentralized storage is not only cheap but also performant enough to serve as a viable CDN.
“After silently iterating on it ever since introducing streaming to Sia, we have optimized Sia’s streaming capabilities to smoothly stream even your highest quality content. Sia will even stream your favorite 4k content seamlessly, thanks to host prioritization, intelligent buffering and an improved renter-host protocol. To conserve bandwidth, Sia will also automatically stream the file right from disk if you haven’t deleted the local copy yet. That way you can start streaming even before your file is done uploading.”
– The Sia Team
How It Works
If you are a developer and want to start, check out the video streaming documentation. If curious to see how it works, first check out the Sia website to find out how to set up a Sia node.
After a user funds their Sia node, they are then able to upload video files. In the following example, a file called “Sintel.2010.4k.mkv” will be uploaded to the SiaPath “movies/Sintel.2010.4k.mkv.” To make sure you are actually streaming from the Sia network and not from the local disk, wait until the health of the file has reached 100% and delete the local copy.
Next, open a media player of choice. It doesn’t matter which one as long as it can play a file from a network location and supports the format of the file. In this example, the VLC media player is used. Hit CTRL + n to get to the “open media” dialogue and paste in the URL from the screenshot below but make sure to replace “movies/Sintel.2010.4k.mkv” with the SiaPath to uploaded file.
