How Livepeer is Powering Video Streaming Success

Streaming video has seen tremendous growth over the past decade, and now makes up the majority of Internet traffic. But as more and more creators have attempted to find success with streaming, they have run head-first into important challenges that make it difficult to reap meaningful benefits from traditional video streaming economics. Livepeer enables developers to rethink and rebuild the streaming economy. They can use blockchain technology to empower creators while still delivering industry-leading reliability and quality. In the past year, we have made great progress on our journey toward that goal.

Stream on

When COVID-19 lockdowns shuttered clubs and silenced the party scene, DJs who once entertained packed live audiences were forced to seek out virtual venues for their meticulously curated music sets. Enter PlayDJ.tv — a new streaming service that not only enables DJs to reach fans in their own homes, but also helps them earn money doing so. The platform could not have launched at a better time: in April, just as pandemic-related restrictions began to spread across the globe. It proved an instant hit, attracting thousands of users within weeks.

PlayDJ.tv was so popular, in fact, that it almost became a victim of its own success. To ensure its users could provide their audiences sharp and stable feeds, PlayDJ.tv was required to pay hefty fees to centralized platforms for transcoding — the formatting of raw video to make it look great on any device at any speed. Costs quickly rose to unsustainable levels.

Just when the situation seemed dire, PlayDJ.tv found a remedy: Livepeer, the world’s first decentralized video infrastructure. Thanks to Livepeer’s distributed network, the newly launched platform was able to cut its transcoding costs tenfold and again afford to offer the free and low-cost features its creative user base sought.

Opportunity for disruption

Growth in the $70 billion streaming industry has boomed since the pandemic began. Housebound users turned to video for everything from entertainment and yoga to tutorials in physics and pastries. Creators, seeing untapped potential, stepped in to fill the void.

Video now accounts for 80% of all web traffic. But now, Livepeer is helping ensure that not all of that volume is captured by established, Web2 streaming platforms. Increasingly, creatives who want to monetize their time and form strong economic bonds with viewers are turning away from Big Tech and toward specialist platforms like PlayDJ.tv. Livepeer’s decentralized infrastructure is helping to make this possible.

Without infrastructure of their own, specialist streaming start-ups previously had to turn to large, centralized, high-cost providers for services such as hosting, storage and transcoding. Hefty charges often dashed their dreams of disrupting the video sphere. To succeed, a new generation of streaming apps needs affordable global infrastructure, and Livepeer is aiming to be the network that they build upon from day 1.

By freeing them from the weight of traditional cost structures, we give fledgling streaming providers the power to compete with established players. Livepeer’s decentralized network, built atop the Ethereum blockchain and sustained by thousands of video miners and tokenholders, has come a long way in a short time. Livepeer node operators have enough computing power and capacity to encode all the real-time video that flows through Twitch, Facebook and YouTube combined. This is the kind of power that can help make Livepeer the primary infrastructure for the entire streaming industry.

And in March, Livepeer’s mission and cryptoeconomic design got a vote of confidence from Grayscale Investments, the world’s largest digital asset management firm, when it added a Livepeer Trust to its family of sought-after assets.

Livepeer is seeing strong growth

But we also know that sustainable success is not a product of buzz within the crypto community or on asset exchanges. We rely on a more concrete yardstick: how much developers are using our network to solve their problems. The metric we look at here is how many minutes of video are transcoded on our network each week.

In summer of 2020, the Livepeer network was processing 10,000–20,000 minutes of input video a week. By the fall, that had quintupled to 100,000 minutes. More recently, we have been seeing volumes above 400,000 minutes per week. This massive acceleration was driven by user-generated content applications — think PlayDJ.tv — as well as by pioneering web3 initiatives such as file.video.

File.video, an experimental decentralized hosting site designed to provide a blueprint to disrupt the Vimeos and YouTubes of the world, is the brainchild of Livepeer community member and web3 infrastructure developer BUIDL Labs. The site is free for creators to use, since Livepeer and web3 R&D operation Protocol Labs are picking up the tab for transcoding and storage.

Beyond transcoding

We expect the hugely creative Livepeer community will generate a host of web3 applications in the years to come. Meanwhile, we are exploring an array of products and services to help video developers achieve success in the burgeoning streaming market.

Our research teams have determined that the Livepeer network has the power to support many other useful video processing tasks that carry a hefty price tag when handled via traditional cloud services. Our teams have run a range of proofs-of-concept, including:

• Scene classification in real-time: AI can help flag such issues as adult content or rights problems, which can forestall both legal issues and viewer complaints. This can be pricey and imperfect when handled by human teams alone.
• Object recognition: Allows providers to pick out a specific object from a video stream, highlight it and make it clickable or enhance it with metadata. Useful for e-commerce or interactive games.
• Song-title detection: The detection of music in the background of streams can help specialist platforms manage rights and licensing and avoid issues with mainstream streaming services.
• Video fingerprinting: Livepeer has the capacity to generate thousands of such fingerprints, which can provide proof of ownership as well as evidence that content is appearing as originally published. Such evidence can underpin the creation of video-linked non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

These are just a few of the ways we are working to help talented developers bring their game-changing ideas to fruition in a market that is primed for disruption.

Click here to learn more — and stay tuned for more updates.