Livepeer

Through the power of open source software, the harnessing of underutilized resources like compute and bandwidth, and the use of cryptoeconomic incentives for bootstrapping and participation, there is an opportunity to deliver an infrastructure that can power video streaming applications at a highly efficient price, and infinite scale.

Along with the proliferation of high quality cameras and ubiquitous bandwidth, the belief is that this will enable video applications to be created that were never before possible under traditional, centralized cost structures, which unlock communications, economic opportunity, and entertainment for society going forward.

By providing the best possible portal to Livepeer, we hope to help capture this opportunity and fulfill the project’s mission as laid out in the original whitepaper and founder’s statement — to build the world’s open video infrastructure.

The vision of the decentralized web has begun to be realized over the past couple years with the emergence of networks like Ethereum to enable trustless computing, Swarm and IPFS/Filecoin to enable decentralized storage and content distribution, Bitcoin and various token projects to facilitate p2p transfer of value, and decentralized name registries like Blockstack and ENS to provide human accessible names to content and identities. These elements form the basis for decentralized applications (DApps) to be built in the form of largely static or infrequently updated web or mobile content, but at the moment DApps still lack the ability to include streaming media and data in an open and decentralized way. The goal of the Livepeer project is to decentralize live video broadcast over the internet.

The Livepeer Project Overview provides a nice introduction to the current state of live video on the internet. This whitepaper will largely focus on the cryptoeconomic protocol details of Livepeer, rather than the business case, but in summary the overview describes the current state of live streaming as growing at a rapid pace, centralized, and expensive. On the other hand, a fully decentralized P2P solution, where nodes contributed their own computation and bandwidth in service of streaming live video would be more open and scalable, as there would be no limit to the number of connections that could be served.

This technology is certainly available to a certain extent, but to date there has been no incentive to get users to run nodes that provide this functionality, nor has there been proper funding for the development of an open protocol that can facilitate this in a way that benefits the entire internet rather than one centralized company. However, with the recent emergence of crypto token powered protocols, there is now an opportunity to simultaneously incentivize users to contribute computation and bandwidth towards live video broadcast, in a way that aligns with financing the development of an open media server solution capable of delivering live streamed video according to all the latest standards and formats required to reach the full range of devices. Additionally, the economic actions traditionally seen as a result of token powered protocols indicate that the cost to the broadcaster in order to use the Livepeer network could be cheaper than the cost of any centralized solution.