Livepeer Expands Video Capabilities with Acquisition of MistServer

We are excited to share the news that Livepeer Inc. has acquired MistServer. Livepeer’s mission is to build the world’s open video infrastructure, and this acquisition marks a major step toward realizing our commitment to invest in both the supply and demand sides of the ecosystem. The Livepeer and MistServer teams share a conviction that the world’s most scalable, affordable, and reliable open video infrastructure should be paired with the world’s best open video software. Together, Livepeer and MistServer provide a disruptive infrastructure that offers a high-quality, low-cost alternative to the traditional proprietary vendors running on expensive big tech cloud platforms.

MistServer, a widely used media server created by video developers, is already integrated with Livepeer, enabling MistServer users to take advantage of Livepeer’s scalable infrastructure for video transcoding. In fact, much of the traffic on the Livepeer network today comes through MistServer users. Working closely together on a unified product roadmap will accelerate the Livepeer Network’s demand side adoption, driving more work and fees to the node operators who leverage Livepeer Token to perform work on the supply side of the network.

In the early days of building out Livepeer, there was a large gap between the capabilities that a decentralized and nascent video streaming network in the web3 world could offer, and those available through proprietary technology in the traditional web2 world. This gap has narrowed rapidly since, driven by the Livepeer community of developers, node operators, and token holders, who have all contributed to an increasingly robust video ecosystem.

This acquisition will accelerate this process still further, by adding the wide-ranging capabilities of the MistServer product — from additional video ingest and origin protocols, VOD and streaming workflows, and low latency solutions — into the ecosystem. While integrating all these features into the network itself will be part of an ongoing roadmap, video developers today can already take advantage of these technologies through MistServer, while leveraging Livepeer for scalable transcoding and streaming infrastructure.

Livepeer will gain more than a great piece of video technology through this acquisition. The top-flight product and engineering organization of the Amsterdam-based DDVTech B.V., the team behind the development of MistServer, will be a substantial addition to the core development team. The union with MistServer is a powerful decentralizing force for the project, grows Livepeer’s presence in Europe, increases the team size of core contributors to 32, and adds many existing Mist users to the ecosystem. Livepeer, Inc. looks forward to welcoming all MistServer users, and to expanding the support and technical capability available to them.

DDVTech CTO Jaron Viëtor said:

“There could not be a more fitting team to work with, as Livepeer and DDVTech perfectly align in terms of philosophy and long-term goals. I’m looking forward to further growing both the MistServer product and the Livepeer brand in general, and bringing more exciting technologies to the open video infrastructure ecosystem. The resources and experience that the combined teams bring to the table open up a staggering amount of possibilities. This is a very exciting time for all of us.”

The MistServer acquisition is the latest development in a period of huge growth and momentum across the Livepeer project. From hitting record highs in network usage, to raising a $20M Series B from top crypto and traditional investors to pursue the mission of building the world’s open infrastructure, to the maturity of the Livepeer.com hosted gateway, to the launch of a host of great new creator economy streaming apps on the network, 2021 was an exceptional year for Livepeer. With the expanded capabilities and team gained through this acquisition, 2022 looks set to be equally big. And Livepeer is bringing all these pieces together just in time to serve the rising creator economy and social streaming apps being built with the web3 stack.

If you’re interested in being an early user of this integrated infrastructure, please email us at: mist@livepeer.com.