Livepeer – Decentralized Live Video Broadcasting Network?

Livepeer is an open platform for decentralized live video broadcasting. Read our Livepeer review today to find out how it works.

What is Livepeer?

Livepeer was founded with the goal of creating a cheaper, more scalable, more decentralized live streaming solution. To achieve that goal, Livepeer uses a crypto token incentivized system based on the blockchain.

In layman’s terms, Livepeer is a video streaming platform where users can contribute unused bandwidth and processing power in exchange for tokens. Meanwhile, broadcasters can spend tokens to enjoy cheap live video streaming across the internet.

Like similar decentralized platforms available online today, Livepeer is based on the blockchain. Blockchain technology has already revolutionized the payment processing industry, so it makes sense that it would revolutionize industries like video streaming as well.

The project was announced in March 2017 with a blog post on Medium. In that blog post, company founder Doug Petkanics described how the company believes “that every person should have access to a platform to share their voice”. Livepeer was founded “to provide the open platform that gives broadcasters, developers, and users the easy ability to get their content and message to the world.”

Today, more people are canceling their cable plans and turning to online streaming options. Modern cable channels are dying. However, there’s one problem with this model: it continues to be expensive to start your own broadcast channel and reach a wide audience. Livepeer aims to solve that problem and give everyone a voice.

Benefits of Livepeer

Livepeer offers cheaper video streaming through decentralization. The decentralization of the Livepeer system leads to benefits like:

• Cheaper to the end user
• More scalable
• More resilient without a single point of failure
• Open (from both a development standpoint and from a censorship perspective)

Ultimately, Livepeer is like the online video streaming we use today – but cheaper, more scalable, more open source, and without censorship. It’s a democratization of video streaming.

How Does Livepeer Work?

Livepeer accomplishes the above benefits using a combination of an open source media server, a peer-to-peer network, and a blockchain based crypto-economy. Together, these platforms provide cheaper live video broadcasting.

The Livepeer platform lets users or broadcasts send streams through Livepeer. That platform does all of the processing required to convert the video into every format and bitrate, allowing broadcasters to reach the majority of audiences across all devices and connection speeds. The Livepeer platform also distributes content to anyone who requests it.

Obviously, we’ve seen the blockchain’s impact on a variety of industries – including payment processing, computation, and storage. Livepeer aims to bring the benefits of the blockchain and decentralization into the video streaming world.

Livepeer is an open source project that’s freely available on Github and under active development. You can view the Github page for Livepeer here.

Livepeer Tokens

The Livepeer platform revolves around the use of crypto-tokens. This system has not yet been implemented into Livepeer, but it will be implemented in the future.

In the future, nodes in the Livepeer network will earn crypto-token incentives for contributing their processing power and bandwidth to the video streaming platform. They’ll also earn tokens for participating in the security protocol.

Broadcasters will then spend tokens in exchange for processing power and bandwidth. They’ll be able to access the live video streaming by spending Livepeer’s tokens.

At the moment, Livepeer’s code features a high level protocol concept. However, the crypto-token concept will continue to be implemented over the coming months.

You can read more about Livepeer at their whitepaper here. The whitepaper features an in-depth description of the Livepeer network, token system, protocol, incentives, and more. Stay tuned for more information about Livepeer as the platform continues to roll out worldwide.