Announcing Livepeer’s Series A, First Video Product, and Pilot Program
We are happy to share the news that Livepeer Inc has raised $8M from institutional investors to support the further development of the Livepeer ecosystem. The company will be using the capital to continue to invest in the buildout of the Livepeer protocol, network, and software, as well as to productize on top of the network to drive adoption amongst scaled video applications and independent video developers.
The round was led by Northzone, who brings significant media experience as the first investors in Spotify, in addition to a video investing history through platforms like FuboTV and VideoPlaza. Additional participants include firms Digital Currency Group, Libertus, Collaborative Fund, Notation Capital, Compound, North Island, Coinfund, and StakeZero — all of which have a deep understanding of decentralized networks, blockchain technology, and are eager to help Livepeer create a disruptive decentralized video infrastructure. Also participating were video technology company Haivision, inventors of the SRT protocol and industrial encoding leaders, and Ben Rubin, founder of video applications Houseparty and Meerkat. David Mendels, former CEO of Brightcove, has joined the company as an active advisor as well.
In the year since launching the Livepeer protocol on mainnet, thousands of users have participated in securing and operating the protocol, over 30 infrastructure operators have run live on the network, and over 100 events have been streamed using Livepeer’s technology. The upcoming Streamflow release will take this early functional network, and make it reliable and cost-effective for scaled usage. We’re excited that this new capital will enable Livepeer to productize this technology and drive adoption amongst not only apps and DApps, but scaled video-enabled businesses and enterprises as well.
We’re building the first developer product on top of Livepeer
Livepeer Inc. is helping to bootstrap the network by beginning to develop products that will get video flowing into the network. We’re starting with plugins that enable existing transcoding services and media servers to run Livepeer under the hood, increase their revenue, and reduce capital expenditure. We think product offerings through existing video developer workflows are the fastest ways to gain adoption of the open source infrastructure.
Currently, video platform companies pay high infrastructure costs to companies like Amazon or Google for operating their transcoding services for customers, capturing only a margin or license fee on top.
With plugins to their existing workflows, existing video platforms and applications can capture a piece of the infrastructure spend that would have gone to Amazon or Google, and drive many existing customers on to the network. Livepeer makes operating video infrastructure simple and easy, because users will be able to run fewer servers and scale on demand. Livepeer also reduces the cost of transcoding, making it cost-effective to transcode long-tail content. Making long tail live transcoding affordable will unlock new business models never before possible.
Livepeer’s Pilot Partner Program launches this fall
Engineers who need live video encoding with guaranteed reliability, on demand, at scale, are invited to join Livepeer as a design partner. We’re providing five companies who join as design partners with free live video encoding for 6 months, up to 100 concurrent streams. If you’re a video engineer who likes being first to use the newest technology, if you’re excited to take part in the design process and share your user feedback, we’d love to hear from you. Beyond the pilot, Livepeer’s network will enable you to transcode live video at a fraction of the cost of existing closed, proprietary providers.
Be the first to try the plugin
If you’re already using a media server, you‘ll keep your existing workflow and tech stack as it is, simply plugging into the Livepeer network of compute resources to do the work under the hood.
→ Sign up here to get early access.
Livepeer is building an open, reliable infrastructure to power the internet.
Today, 80% of all internet bandwidth is consumed by video streaming. It’s easy to understand why: video is empowering, engaging, and illustrative. However, for companies, it’s really expensive to stream — and even more expensive to live stream. We believe that live streaming is a powerful storytelling tool that will be the cornerstone of communication in the 21st century, and that anyone should be able to create and share video content reliably, at scale, in an affordable way. Allowing the behemoths to be the main ones who profit from the power of storytelling just won’t cut it. Join us in making live video the narrative of the 21st century.
