Distributed smooth streaming utilizing dynamic manifests

A method for sharing content, the method comprising the steps of:

• receiving manifests from multiple computing devices, each of the received manifests comprising an indication of segments of the shared content that are available from a computing device associated with the manifest and further comprising an indication, for each of the segments, of encodings of that segment that are available from the computing device associated with the manifest;
• and
• generating an aggregated manifest comprising, for each computing device associated with each received manifest, the indication of the segments of the shared content that are available from that computing device and the indication, for each of the segments, of the encodings of that segment that are available from that computing device;
• utilizing the generated aggregated manifest to request the shared content from multiple computing devices identified in the aggregated manifest as comprising segments encoded in a requested encoding such that individual segments are interleaved from the multiple computing devices;
• and
• requesting segments, comprising equivalent portions of the shared content to segments the have already been received, which hive been encoded in lower resolution encoding than the segments that have already been received;
• wherein each encoding of a segment is independent of, and was generated independently of, any different encoding of the segment.

One or more computer-readable storage media comprising computer-executable instructions for sharing content, the computer-executable instructions directed to steps comprising:

• encoding the content, utilizing a first quality encoding, to generate a first set of segments;
• independently encoding the content, utilizing a second quality encoding, having a lower resolution than the first quality encoding, to generate a second set of segments, wherein each segment in the second set of segments comprises an equivalent portion of the content to a corresponding segment in the first set of segments;
• generating a manifest comprising an indication of the first and second sets of segments that are available and further comprising an indication of encodings for each of the available segments;
• providing the generated manifest to a first computing device independent of a computing device executing the computer-executable instructions, wherein the first computing device generates an aggregated manifest from the generated manifest and from another manifest received from another computing device that comprises at least some of the first set of segments or at least some of the second set of segments, wherein the aggregated manifest comprises, for each computing device associated with each received manifest, an indication of segments of the content that are available from the associated computing device and an indication of the encodings for each of the available segments from the associated computing device;
• copying, to the first computing device, only some of the first set of segments identified in the aggregated manifest;
• and subsequently copying, to the first computing device, at least some of the second set of segments identified in the aggregated manifest, the copied at least some of the second set of segments being of equivalent portions of the content to the copied some of the first set of segments.