During the recent Egyptian revolution that involved mass protests in the streets, the current government had chosen to shut down the entire Internet feed to the country in an attempt to isolate them from the rest of the world. Along with the Internet shutdown came a great deal of obfuscation set over media coming out of the country, especially that covering the current status and activities of the protestors. It was an act that displayed the sheer power of a government to cut off a major stream of information.

However, the Mubarak regime couldn’t silence terrestrial journalism and others who used other communication systems to get news out of the country and to outlets like Al Jazeera. During the protests, users of Roku—a set-top box and Internet streaming-video platform that permits users to add streams, called “channels” from 3rd parties—engineers at Roku’s network discovered users who had started to hook into Al Jazeera English coverage of the Egyptian protestors via a convoluted route.

Understanding how important the distribution of this sort of stream out of Egypt could be, the engineering team at Roku went to work making the stream readily available to all Roku consumers. John Furrier, the Founder of SiliconANGLE, spoke at length with Brian Jaquet, Director of Communications at Roku, about how they handled the situation.

While Google, Twitter and Facebook played an instrumental role in getting on the ground protestors’ voices heard during the revolution, Roku played an important part early on in getting the only live video coverage seen outside of Egypt for the West.

Roku maintains a powerful platform for users to distribute their own content such as services like Ooyala. There’s also other streaming solutions available such as PlayOn. According to the interview, Jaquet says that it took them only about 18 hours from the discovery of the stream to getting it distributed into the West—delivering the first, and for a while only, video feed about the Egyptian protestors for some time.

It’s a good thing to be said that technology is fundamentally subversive. Put into the hands of the people themselves it enables the mass distribution of the hardest-to-get information to the widest audience and provides a chink in the armor of any tyrannical regime.

Cutting off all information going in or out by switching off the Internet, Egypt not only failed to capably cut off the protestors, the rest of the world still maintained that they are part of a larger community and used that technology to make sure the protestors’ voices would be heard.