Livepeer: greatest autonomy ever for video broadcasters thanks to blockchain technology!

Introduction

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Having access to new information as fast as possible has always been a service highly valuable by the society, this is why every time there is a major event happening, all of the different media companies and their news reporters will compete fiercely with each other with the goal of being the first one in informing the public, the rewards for being there first are simply worth all the hustle.

It was until not so long ago, that the only way of having live video footage was through a TV subscription that included the broadcasts of several media companies, but technology innovations are always capable of enabling important changes that end up bringing benefits for everyone involved.

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In this case, the creation of the internet, and the eventual progression towards high-speed connections, made it possible for a new type of platform to be developed. Video sites like YouTube started to pop out of everywhere, up to the point that right now, uploading a video to the internet is a totally natural thing to do, and the same can be said about broadcasting live videos.

Popular platforms like the already mentioned YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, among many others that are specialized in live videos such as YouNow, Twitch & Ustream, allow their users to start a live broadcast by just clicking or tapping a few buttons, this results in a democratization in the possibility of broadcasting live videos for the world to see.

What was once only something that a few selective media companies could offer, it is now something that pretty much everyone is able to do for themselves and share with whoever they choose. Nevertheless, even though most of the people are now able to have their own individual broadcasts, and show their live personal videos, there are still a few select companies that hold tremendous control over this industry.

The problems of only having centralized media platforms

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The internet allows the people a higher level of freedom that didn’t exist before, but it also makes it possible for some corporations to hold a lot of control over people’s lives, by simply filtering the content they can consume, or the content they can share, these corporations can effectively decide what type of information is available for everyone to see.

In fact, there have been some controversies when big video platforms, it was reported that YouTube decided to censor content due to political reasons, a very recent example can be found here where it was announced that PragerU was filling a lawsuit against YouTube and Google due to unlawful censorship agains their content.

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While the fact that these online platforms can help a lot of people to freely share their content, it doesn’t mean there is actually a proper freedom because censorship does happen from time to time, besides, when it comes to live streaming important events, there are only a handful of companies capable of handling that much data, resulting in even more control in the hands of these corporations.

The only solution to prevent big companies from enforcing censorship is to outcompete them by developing new platforms where censorship is virtually impossible, allowing the users the option of adopting these platforms and eventually displacing the centralized ones from the lead position in the market. But it is very clear that achieving such a feat is extremely challenging.

Enter Livepeer

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Livepeer is basically a new protocol that will aid developers into creating their own decentralized live streaming projects running on the Ethereum blockchain, the main goal is to facilitate the creation of a new generation of video platforms that are not only censorship resistant, but can also scale easily without incurring in high operational costs.

There are 2 main types of participants that are needed in order for this protocol to function properly:

• Developers: as mentioned before, being a protocol it will need other developing teams to implement Livepeer into their own projects, this will allow users to have access to the decentralized live streaming network

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• Video miner: live streaming content needs to be properly processed so people can easily consume it using any device they might have available, the video processing requires computing power that can be provided by any person willing to participate in Livepeer’s network, this ensures that everything functions on a decentralized way.

In order to make sure that people with extra computational resources are incentivized to share them with this network, they will be rewarded with Livepeer Tokens (LPT) based on how much processing power and bandwidth they manage to share.

How to start using Livepeer

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Despite the fact that Livepeer’s protocol can spark a digital revolution in favor of decentralized live streaming platforms, so far the project still needs to be further developed so the general public can really start to use it.

At the moment of this writing, Livepeer is only available for technical users running OS X or Linux as their operative system, the official instructions to install this protocol can be found in the project’s documents. The reason why I say this is for technical users is because the latest version is meant to only be used in tests, and the fact it is not available for Windows nor mobile devices means there is a lot of work to do before this protocol is ready to be released to the masses.

Positive aspects of Livepeer

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• Being an open source project, everything regarding its development and further enhancements will be available to the public, which could end up strengthening the reliability of the software.
• Decentralization will make it close to impossible for censorship to exist in the Livepeer network, and unlike the traditional centralized platforms, people will now be able to broadcast their videos without having to endure any censorship whatsoever.
• Given the fact everyone can participate in the network as a video miner, there will be a strong competition and ultimately, those that are the most efficient with the use of resources will be properly rewarded by the market.
• This efficiency will make this network operate on a cost-effective way, offering a cheap and trustworthy platform for the video streaming market, besides, since adding new video miners is something very simple to do, the network is designed to easily scale and increase its computational power.
• It could serve as the backbone for dapps to offer a live streaming feature to its users.

In the following picture we can see some of the advantages Livepeer has over traditional video streaming platforms that don’t leverage the capabilities of blockchain technology and decentralization.

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Negative aspects of Livepeer

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* Despite being announced more than 2 years ago, the protocol is not yet completely finished and there is no Windows version to facilitate adoption. Mobile versions aren’t available neither which is worrisome because those devices are the most popular ones when live streaming a video. * The documents section of the website hasn’t been updated since 2017, which is the year visitors can see when checking the bottom of the page. It gives the impression that this project is being developed very slowly, the longer it takes to be developed and released, the harder it will be to gain any traction in the market. * There isn’t an authentic volume of transactions, as we can see in the picture below, the entire monthly volume happened in one week, and by looking at the graphic, it seems to be just a single day with considerable movements, which means these aren’t users but probably the developers doing some testing. This shows there aren’t users actively engaging with this project. For more data about Livepeer’s activity and numbers, feel free to check its State of the Dapps website

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Conclusion

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The team at Livepeer certainly have a sound idea about how the next generation of video streaming platforms could be improved to surpass the current ones. Implementing blockchain technology and its inherent decentralization will bring some clear benefits and advantages that traditional centralized platforms can’t compete with, which means that from the technological point of view, Livepeer might have a slight advantage over current competitors.

However, the time it is taking for the team to deliver on its plans can be bothersome, and as months and years go by, the chances of a different project to release their blockchain based video streaming platform and take over this market are constantly increasing. In technology there are always innovative ideas being developed and released into the market, if Livepeer can’t finish up the development of the platform in a timely manner, this project will probably end up unsuccessful.

I give this project a 2 stars rating because it not only is not user-friendly, but it is clear there is still a long way to go for Livepeer to become a platform attractive enough for regular users. The idea behind the project is great, especially due to the benefits that blockchain technology makes possible, but the actual delivery on these ideas have been lacking so far. Nevertheless, there is still hope for Livepeer, its whitepaper was updated in December 2018, meaning the team is actively working on it, and there is also an active community participating and discussing the project in its online forum which is something quite nice to see.

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Repository

https://github.com/livepeer/go-livepeer

Resources

Livepeer whitepaper
Introducing Livepeer
Livepeer for beginners
Livepeer documentation
State of the Dapps - Livepeer

DISCLAIMER

This is not a financial advice. Please do your own research before investing in cryptocurrencies or any digital asset. This blog post is done for entertainment and knowledge purpose only.