# Marcus Delgado, Lead Editor at Ironside Post — read of iroh-p2p-video-collaboration, June 18 2026

> 11 years in post-production, running a team of 5 editors at an 8-person doc and branded content shop in Austin. Frame.io customer. Unhappy about it since the Adobe acquisition.

## How I got here

My Frame.io renewal came in last week and I went looking. Typed "frame.io alternative p2p video" into Google, this showed up around page two. Clicked because p2p is the idea I've thought about myself and never seen anyone actually ship. My nine-year-old was at soccer practice, I had an hour, I read the whole thing.

## What I clicked first

"No servers. No latency."

That's the hero. "No latency" stopped me immediately because that is not how p2p works. P2p has latency. It has different latency than a round-trip to AWS us-east-1, but it is not zero. Depending on the network topology between two machines it can actually be worse. This isn't a dealbreaker on the product idea, but it told me right away that whoever wrote this copy either isn't a network engineer, or made a decision to oversimplify something that shouldn't be oversimplified. Both bother me a little.

## Where I paused

About halfway down: "Your video editing stays where it belongs: on your hardware, shared only with collaborators you choose. No intermediaries. No monthly bills. No vendor lock-in."

I paused not because it's wrong, but because it's describing exactly what I want, and I got suspicious. Products that perfectly describe your dream are either the real thing or they're using the dream to paper over something they haven't built yet.

Then I hit this: "Honest disclosure: we don't have live customers on this idea yet."

So. The product doesn't exist. The "Start editing now" button in the hero is fiction. The entire top half of the page is marketing copy for software that has never been installed on a single user's machine. I had to read the page twice to figure out what was actually being sold.

## What I distrusted

The Fermi math showing up mid-page. "$-33,948 Year-1 take-home" and "1 in 11 Meaningful-success odds" appear on the same page as "Edit in real-time. No roundtrips to distant data centers. No waiting for transcoding." The page is simultaneously pitching the dream to a filmmaker and telling an entrepreneur the dream probably won't work out financially. That's a strange two-audience experience and I'm not sure which one I am.

Also: "All edits are cryptographically signed to prevent tampering." Tampering from whom? My co-editor on a session I invited them to? A man-in-the-middle attack on a video editing timeline? This is a real distributed systems concern being dropped into copy for people who just want to know if it works with Premiere. It reads like a feature checklist, not a customer benefit.

The page also never says what NLE this integrates with. Not once. "Video editing" is not software, it's an activity. Premiere? Resolve? Avid? DaVinci? Is this an extension, a separate app, a timeline format, an API? The whole technical section explains the networking without explaining the product.

## What would convince me

A thirty-second screen recording of two machines syncing a timeline edit. Not a concept render. Not animated diagrams. A boring screen capture of someone hitting a cut on one machine and seeing it appear on another. Real footage, real file sizes, ideally something like 4K ProRes so I know it can handle actual media weights. If the sync is real, that video would travel fast in the editing communities I'm in.

And specifically: what happens to conflicting edits? If my co-editor and I both trim the same clip at the same moment, who wins? This is the question that will determine whether this is real collaboration software or a novelty.

## What I'd ask in an email reply

1. What editing software does this actually integrate with, and is there a working build I can install today?
2. How does conflict resolution work on simultaneous edits to the same clip or track region?
3. The $99 "adopt the build" tier: does that mean I receive code I can run, or a plan document for how someone could theoretically build it? Those are very different things.

## Verdict: on-the-fence

If there's a working build that names the NLE and shows sync happening on real footage, I'd download it this week. But the page made me work too hard to understand that there is no product yet, and most of the editors I know would have closed the tab before they reached the honest disclosure section.

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*Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-06-18. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*