Product Updates and Growth Areas: Decentralized Social Media, Web3 Creator Economy, Metaverse and Gaming

In Q2 2022, the Livepeer core team focused on dramatically improving the developer experience of Livepeer Studio. Interestingly, we are already seeing a rapid increase in the number of experiments in three growth areas: decentralized social media, the web3 creator economy, and the metaverse-gaming industry. I’d like to explore these areas, as we are planning to focus on these verticals and introduce more web3 specific features to power new use cases in the coming quarters.

Building The World’s Web3 Video Infrastructure

From 2016 to 2021, overall internet traffic has grown about 3x and video-based traffic has risen from 73% to 82%. Video streaming is in an exponential growth phase and has cemented itself as a key format for communication and entertainment.

As web3 moves beyond the speculative phase towards the consumer adoption phase, video will become increasingly essential for decentralized applications that are onboarding a new wave of users. Additionally, as we enter this new phase, our goal is not limited to simply supplying developers with tools to add video to their applications. We must also enable developers to build experiences that align with core web3 values and solve problems, like walled gardens and privacy concerns, that were endemic in web2.

Livepeer Updates in Q2 2022

Diving into the product updates in Q2, the Livepeer core team officially launched Livepeer Studio and released software updates for Livepeer Catalyst and Mist Server 3.1.

Livepeer Studio

Livepeer Studio is the video toolkit for web3 application developers that want to add video streaming capabilities to their applications. It currently has three products:

• Video on demand (VOD): Accelerated video streaming on top of web3 storage networks for permanent access and global delivery
• Livestreaming: Livestream to a global audience and process live video on the Livepeer network at a fraction of the cost of traditional cloud providers
• Video NFT Minting: mint video NFTs on popular blockchains for optimized playback in NFT marketplaces, web3 apps, and wallets

Livepeer Catalyst

Livepeer Catalyst is the new Livepeer broadcaster node software that enables hosting of a decentralized media server with powerful video features. The media servers seamlessly connect to the Livepeer network for video ingestion, transcoding, and delivery. This is an important technology that marks the completion of the video streaming stack within the Livepeer ecosystem.

MistServer 3.1

A sizable portion of Livepeer Catalyst’s software comes from MistServer, a livestreaming media toolkit, that was acquired by Livepeer Inc. last year. When MistServer joined Livepeer Inc., the first thing we did together was open-source its entire software package. Since then, we’ve been continuously adding new features to MistServer and released MistServer 3.1 in Q2. It’s an interesting piece of software, so check out the release notes if you are interested in digging deeper.

What is Livepeer Studio?

Livepeer Studio currently has three products: video on demand, livestreaming, and video NFT minting.

Video On Demand

Users can upload videos to Livepeer Studio via an API call. Livepeer Studio handles ingesting, transcoding, storing, and caching videos, and enables video playback. Livepeer Studio simplifies this process by wrapping it all up into a few simple API calls. After a video is uploaded, it is automatically processed without additional user input, and returned as a playback URL. All developers have to do is plug that URL into their application via the embedded Livepeer video player or any other popular video player, and that’s it.

Livestreaming

Livestreaming with Livepeer Studio is just as simple. Users can livestream through broadcasting software, like OBS Studio, or through a mobile application using the phone’s camera. Whichever way it’s done, there is an ingest URL that is exposed when the video channel is created and users can start pushing data. Livepeer Studio handles the heavy lifting in the background.

Video NFT Minting

Videos uploaded into Livepeer Studio can be exported into decentralized storage solutions, like Arweave or IPFS, and minted as video NFTs.

Most of the NFTs today are still image-based, but we’re starting to see more interesting use cases where NFTs are evolving past the Profile Picture (PFP) trend and towards a “utility” trend with new core primitives like video NFTs. One of the interesting experimentations with utility-based NFTs on Livepeer Studio is protocols limiting access to a video or a livestream, based on the state on the blockchain, which is called “token gating”.

For example, broadcasters can reward NFT-holders with access to an exclusive livestream and block access for everyone else. To accomplish this, developers can implement a webhook handler. When new viewers request to watch a token-gated stream, a request is sent to the webhook handler that can implement any kind of access control logic developers design to customize that experience.

This is an interesting innovation in the web3 video streaming world, as people use decentralized technologies to create new monetization schemes. We’re planning to add many more features to Livepeer Studio to augment these types of innovations. For example, the NFT minting SDK is exclusive to EVM-based chains, but the tool itself is very much chain-agnostic and capable of expanding into other Layer-1 ecosystems.

Growth Areas In Web3 Video

In Q2 2022, the Livepeer core team focused on dramatically improving the developer experience to increase the number of experiments on Livepeer Studio. We’re already seeing some interesting growth areas for web3 video applications: decentralized social media, the web3 creator economy, and the metaverse-gaming industry.

Decentralized Social

There are currently a variety of applications and ecosystems experimenting with Livepeer Studio that are exploring what social media could look like in a web3 context. This growth area is significant because these apps address social problems that are caused by current centralized social media platforms. In fact, at EthCC in Paris, Vitalik Buterin emphasized that solving these problems are mission critical for a healthy web3 ecosystem.

One example of a decentralized social application powered by Livepeer Studio is LensTube.

LensTube is a “decentralized YouTube” that uses the Lens Protocol for its decentralized social graph, Livepeer Studio for its video streaming, and Arweave for its storage. LensTube not only possesses similar functionality as YouTube, but also lets users connect wallets, tip creators directly, and manage monetization with built-in mechanisms.

Web3 Creator Economy

Another interesting growth area that is closely related to decentralized social is the web3 creator economy. The creator economy originated in web2 from platforms, like YouTube and Substack, which helped creators build an audience and generate revenue.

However, we’re seeing, through economic analyses of existing creator economy platforms, that only a tiny percentage of creators are able to actually make a decent living. The vast majority of the creators are unable to make sustainable wages through these platforms.

At the same time, creators are held hostage by centralized entities because their content and brand are locked into those platforms. Creators can’t simply switch platforms with their content and audience intact.

In response to these challenges, we’re seeing a lot of interesting applications and experiments in the web3 creator economy space. One of the Livepeer-powered projects I’m excited about is called INFLOW because these problems are especially salient in the music industry.

INFLOW is a social token launchpad for musicians. Musicians can sell tokens and enable fans to trade for exclusive experiences or digital assets.

Metaverse and Gaming

Metaverse and gaming is a high-potential segment for Livepeer since there is already huge demand for video streaming in the rapidly growing web2 gaming world.

A substantial volume of gaming-related videos get created every day. Consider the growth of esports in the last decade, an industry largely supported by video on demand and livestream content consumption. This is a strong signal that in the web3 world, video will be an important tool for gaming applications and the metaverse.

Livepeer Studio recently had its instructions merged into the official Decentraland video streaming GitHub Repo.

When a creator wants to build a new scene in Decentraland and would like to stream video in some fashion, they’ll have very clear instructions on how to use Livepeer Studio to do that. We’re already seeing this happen — users host events in the metaverse and livestream IRL content to make those events more engaging in the virtual world. Vice versa, we’re seeing video captured from within the metaverse, so that people who are not actively participating in the metaverse can view the virtual events.

In the coming quarters, we’re focused on getting much deeper into each of these verticals, introducing more web3-specific features to power new use cases, and working with the developers to evolve Livepeer Studio.