Theta Token Reddit AMA Highlights
Thanks to everyone who joined us for the 1st Theta Token AMA event! We’ll be following up with more community events soon as our development progress continues. Here are some highlights from the team’s responses to the Theta community:
When the network is launched, how are you going to make Theta mainstream? This is a foreign concept to most people. How will you make it easy for people to understand, and subsequently, join/share bandwidth?
Mitch Liu (CEO): This is a network’s typical “cold start” problem — one of the benefits that Theta has is the established user base of SLIVER.tv in the esports space, which drew over 4 million unique visits in January 2018. This will provide an initial foundation for the network and enough density in more popular countries. More importantly, Theta is forging partnerships with important video, peer-to-peer and media platforms as Dapp partners, such as our announced partnership with SamsungVR. They will essentially serve as “distribution” or “seeding” platforms for the Theta network upon launch. Then, as more DApps are added on top of the network, each of those will promote theta. As we add content, it will be possible for users who view the content to also be caching nodes to stream it and earn Theta for doing so, creating a self-sustaining extra network of nodes when there are more people watching a particular event.
How is the development going and is there anywhere we can follow code updates?
Jieyi Long (CTO): We’re working on launching our testnet which includes our mesh-network for live streaming, our blockchain explorer, and mesh streaming player integrated with our native chain. We hope to launch this by around June timeframe. We want to push code out that’s as solid and robust as possible and to incorporate the community’s feedback and opinion. We will absolutely post the code to GitHub as soon as possible, and certainly before our testnet goes live.
Can you give some examples of what sort of projects we may see come out of the THETA protocol in the future? Right now P2P CDN is a major milestone, but what other large projects could be a possibility on the THETA blockchain in the future?
Riz Virk (Head of Corporate Development): Once the basic infrastructure is in place for the distributed, peer to peer mesh network and Theta blockchain, there are many possible applications. I’m personally excited by a decentralized Netflix where content creators can put their work out directly to the public; a YouTube without censorship is another one that many people are excited about. Other areas include VR streaming, sports streaming, live teaching/educational conferencing, and more interactive applications.
What streaming sites will be the first to use Theta Token besides SLIVER.tv?
Mitch: We recently announced that SamsungVR is spearheading our Media Advisory council, we’re super excited to collaborate with Samsung to use Theta to broadcast 360 VR video content, which consumes huge amounts of bandwidth. We’re talking to a number of other large platform partners and will announce them when ready.
What will the full integration with SLIVER.tv (planned for this month) look like? Is it only for tipping or will we see other functions such as proof of engagement?
Jieyi: Full integration on SLIVER.tv will include more economic incentives to use Theta Token, for example, limited edition virtual goods, premium crates and skins will be purchasable with Theta, in addition to rewarding top streamers. There won’t be proof-of-engagement yet as that requires the functionality of the native Theta blockchain; however, the concept of rewarding users for their engagement is ALREADY live on SLIVER.tv. Users today get 10 free coins (a virtual currency used on SLIVER.tv) per minute for watching our content, so when Theta native chain is live with POE then this will effectively replace our current coins.
What do you see as the greatest benefit to the third world from the Theta project?
Riz: We see a lot of issues with existing CDNs particularly in 3rd world countries, because their points-of-presence (POPs) are too far from end viewers. We saw this at SLIVER first-hand when we live-streamed major VR 360 esports tournaments with ESL, Dreamhack and Intel Extreme Masters, and had hundreds of thousands of viewers in countries like Brazil, Poland, Russia /other Eastern European countries. So imagine if users can share and re-broadcast these streams to other community members and users and earn Theta Tokens as a reward. This is very valuable to users in 3rd world countries. Of course, Theta is applicable to all sorts of video content beyond esports, like music, entertainment, education, media etc.
What are the biggest challenges for Theta Token to be successful making decentralized video?
Mitch: Our biggest challenge is scaling our native chain for millions of microtransactions. Although many of the blockchain projects are facing scaling problems, scaling for live video streaming is different and possibly even more complex, which is why we’re purpose-building a native chain to solve these problems. Typically, video segments are a couple of seconds long and to achieve the finest granularity of token reward — one micropayment per video segment — even a live stream with a moderate 1 million concurrent users could generate a couple hundred thousands microtransactions per second. We are currently working on technologies based on micropayment channel and probabilistic payment schemes to solve this problem.
You can read all of the comments in the AMA thread here! Thanks to the community for participating and we’ll see you for the next one soon!
The Theta Team
