July was a month of momentum for Livepeer

$20 million raised, dashboard revamp and much more

July may fall in the middle of the traditional summer doldrums, but for Livepeer it was one of the busiest periods of 2021 so far.

Here are a few of the highlights:

Fundraising round nets $20 million to future-proof the network

The biggest news came toward the end of the month, when it was announced that Livepeer’s Series B funding round had raised $20 million from a great group of investors to help ready the world’s open video infrastructure for its next growth phase.

The cash will allow Livepeer to make key hires, expand the network across multiple blockchains, and add important capabilities sought by developers, including scene classification, video fingerprinting, and song-title recognition.

Old and new Livepeer supporters joined the round. Led by Digital Currency Group (DCG), the group also included Northzone, Coinbase Ventures, Coinfund, Mike Dudas’s Six Man Ventures, and Warburg Serres. Northzone, DCG and Coinfund were also part of our June 2019 fundraising, which raised $8 million.

This was a welcome vote of confidence in Livepeer’s future from a group of investors with a deep understanding of the transformative potential of decentralization.

The new and improved Livepeer dashboard

July also marked the debut of the sharp new Livepeer.com dashboard after a makeover designed to make it easier for broadcasters to find and manage their streams and to track active stream performance.

The redesign introduces a one-stop Dashboard homepage, with quick links to help users get started, to find out their usage and billing data, and to actively manage their streams.

A new single-page Streams view allows broadcasters to see all session information in one place, while new search-and-filter functionality will make hunting for sessions faster, easier and more flexible. We’ve also embedded a player with the source stream and transcoded renditions right into the Streams page. Users can monitor playback quality and session ingest rate simply by clicking “View Stream Health”.

Best of all, there’s now a “Feedback” button on all screens that allows network users to connect directly with the Livepeer team in seconds.

Find out more about the dashboard redesign here.

Records toppled (again)

We’ve seen a steep and steady overall climb in transcoding activity on the network this year.

In the seven-day period ending July 4th, Livepeer’s infrastructure was used to process 2.4 million minutes of raw video, marking a new record and a six-fold increase in volume from the start of the year. Although there’s some volatility in usage week to week, the popularity of the architecture has been growing as the creator economy continues to expand.

We’ll always have Paris

On July 20th, a team of our top engineers took the Livepeer message to Paris — specifically to ETHcc, Europe’s largest annual Ethereum ecosystem conference.

Product Engineer Adam Soffer, who was among them, saw palpable enthusiasm for Livepeer and its mission, along with requests from developers with ideas for scalable and reliable streaming apps.

And finally…

Livepeer is proud to be a sponsor of HackFS, a 21-day virtual Hackathon organized by ETHGlobal and Filecoin creator Protocol Labs that kicked off July 30. Brilliant web3 hackers will have a chance to compete for more than $175,000 in prize money.

Stay tuned for an update on the great video-related hacks in August.

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