Swarmcast monitors throughput on the requester's system, and checks the availability of peers, so it can increase the number of sources to the maximum possible. However, once somebody has the complete file, his or her system stops serving up content. Swarmcast does not expect systems to be available for serving up data all the time. Swarmcast adds parity information to each chunk. For instance, if parity turns a 2MB file into a 3MB file, each requester needs to download only 2MB of different chunks to reconstruct the file.
Parity thus makes downloading more flexible while guarding against file corruption.
As with Napster or Freenet, people who request files end up storing a copy on their own systems. Thus, popular content multiplies quickly, and people are more and more likely to find available servers nearby. Like many P2P systems, Swarmcast substitutes redundancy for reliability. The Transient Web Like Napster, if you visit the system of someone from whom you've downloaded Swarmcast material, you are likely to find more files of interest to you. Like XDegrees, Swarmcast can also determine intelligently the best system from which to download a file.