Telegram announced a competition to create a YouTube analogue for the messenger

It is quite possible that the Telegram messenger, which simultaneously acts as a social network, cryptocurrency service and news aggregator, may in the future add video hosting functions. This week the company announced in the Telegram Contests channel a competition to create a video player to replace the existing AVPlayer, which in the future could become a competitor to YouTube and other video services.

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The competition invites developers to create a media player from scratch that supports HLS streaming (for both audio and video) for the iOS platform. In the future, apparently, the task will be to develop an analogue for Android and the desktop version of the messenger.

The competition will last until October 25, the results will be announced in November. The winner is promised a reward of $50 thousand. According to the terms of the competition task, the final version of the media player should not cause any performance problems, application instability or multimedia playback.

The media player proposed for participation in the competition must support both automatic and manual switching between available video streams, with automatic switching based on Network bandwidth. The media player must function within the application without using the web interface. You can use a hybrid solution with data management in JavaScript and rendering in native code.

Testing of the solution proposed by the competitor will be carried out in various conditions with multiple media on a number of iOS devices (iOS 12 – iOS 18). In addition to the monetary reward, the winner will be offered cooperation with Telegram.