Livepeer is a decentralized Ethereum-based technology that distributes video transcoding tasks throughout its network. The protocol is designed to create a cost-effective, secure, and dependable infrastructure capable of handling today’s enormous demand for video streaming.
What is Livepeer?
Livepeer is a scalable Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for startups and businesses wishing to incorporate live or on-demand video into their products. Livepeer is a video transcoding protocol based on Ethereum, which refers to the reformatting of a video to fit a variety of bandwidths and devices.
Livepeer is a decentralized marketplace for developers creating apps that incorporate live video and transcoding providers. Its goal is to make streaming more dependable while lowering prices. The Livepeer Token is the network’s native token (LPT).
Livepeer’s fundamental goal is to provide a scalable and cost-effective infrastructure solution that can handle today’s streaming demand. Video streaming consumes 80 percent of internet bandwidth and is particularly expensive on the computational side, owing to the fact that video distributors must first encode video before distributing it.
As a result of the increased expenses, several video streaming firms have resorted to selling user data and exposing consumers to advertisements in order to cover their infrastructure costs.
Livepeer attempts to replace this approach with a decentralized, token-incentivized, and open network that claims to lower expenses by up to 50x when compared to traditional techniques.
Livepeer: roots and history
Since Livepeer is an open-source protocol, developers can freely contribute to the code on GitHub. The Livepeer platform is run by Livepeer Inc, a legal company. Doug Petkanics and Eric Tang created Livepeer Inc.
Doug Petkanics graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor’s degree in computer science in 2006. Since then, he has worked with a number of well-known companies, including Groupon and Wildcard.
He began his career as an analyst at Accenture in 2006, and in 2010, he co-founded Hyperpublic, which was eventually bought by Groupon. Wildcard, a publishing platform, and web browser were co-founded by Petkanics in 2013. He has been the driving force behind Livepeer’s development since 2016.
Eric Tang graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a bachelor’s degree in electrical and computer engineering. He joined Next Jump as a software engineer in 2008, and then in 2010, he joined Clickable as a product manager. Hyperpublic was co-founded by him and Doug Petkanics in 2010. Since then, they have collaborated on Wildcard and, subsequently, Livepeer.
How does Livepeer work?
Adaptive bitrate transcoding, i.e., the reformatting of raw video to guarantee an ideal viewing experience on any device at any network connection, is one of the most important and costly components of traditional video distribution infrastructure.
Livepeer says that its decentralized structure allows them to offer transcoding at up to 50 times cheaper rates than traditional suppliers.
The Livepeer network is made up of tens of thousands of node operators, or “orchestrators,” who supply processing power in return for payments from broadcasters and benefits in the form of LPT, Livepeer’s native coin.
Orchestrators compete for work and the support of Livepeer’s “delegators,” who pledge their tokens to top performers in exchange for a portion of their rewards.
Livepeer nodes transform videos into multiple bitrates and formats and transmit them to broadcasters, in addition to supplying computing power to the network. Broadcaster and relay nodes, on the other hand, are in charge of delivering content to end consumers via web apps and decentralized apps.
The platform is protected by a Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) security system that thwarts a variety of potential attacks (such as consensus attacks and chain reorgs) by requiring that all nodes involved in network security be incentivized to maintain honest behavior and will be slashed for malicious activity.
Why choose Livepeer?
The world’s first decentralized video streaming infrastructure was Livepeer. Livepeer, unlike others in the area, is not a viewer-facing platform and has no aspirations to become one. The team’s exclusive emphasis is on providing developers of streaming apps with the dependable and powerful infrastructure they require to provide their clients with the best possible experience.
The protocol and tokenomics of Livepeer are intended to incentivize involvement, whether through node operation or staking, in order to maintain the infrastructure safe and stable.
More than 70,000 GPUs are already contributing to the network’s functioning, which is enough power to encode all of the real-time video streaming on Twitch, Facebook, and YouTube combined.
A crucial use metric for Livepeer has continued to rise: the volume of raw video transcoded in a week.
Livepeer node operators processed 2.3 million minutes of raw video in seven days ended June 12, 2021, a six-fold increase from the beginning of the year.
Livepeer is also developing a roster of other video processing tools useful to broadcasters, ranging from object recognition to song title detection, as part of its goal to become the industry’s go-to infrastructure. The ultimate goal is to provide a complete variety of tools for video streaming developers in a blockchain-based, democratized, and economical manner.
