All About Livepeer: Future of Video Streaming Services!

Token holders can receive a piece of the network's profits and inflationary token awards for providing security and quality assurance on the network by staking their tokens.

Working of Livepeer

The network can be requested by any user to see the stream, which will be sent to them in near real-time. The Livepeer Media Server, The Livepeer Protocol, the Go-Livepeer node, and are the three main technical components of Livepeer (LPMS). The protocol is a set of Ethereum smart contracts written in Solidity that provide a marketplace for node operators where they can register their services, a payments settlement layer via a delegated stake based protocol for securing and QA'ing network work, and a governance mechanism for voting on and executing protocol upgrades.

Livepeer Media Server

The LPMS is an open-source media server that takes care of everything video-related, including transcoding logic, streaming and playback logic, origin services, ingest protocols, etc. Transcoding live video and audio input streams are required to make them usable on various devices, each with its format and bandwidth requirements. There are centralized services available, but they are usually pricey. The Livepeer Media Server is open-source can be used independently and is an integral part of the Livepeer Network.

Go-Livepeer

The Livepeer node's go-livepeer implementation enables the protocol, communicates with the blockchain, and includes LPMS to handle video broadcast, transcoding, and streaming or playback. Almost 100 additional repositories and projects complement this essential technology, including front-end applications for staking and governance, DevOps scripts for operating network nodes, and a hosted version of the broadcasting capabilities at livepeer.com.

Tokenomics

The native work token of Livepeer is LPT, which is used in the following functions:

Protocol Incentivization: When users run a node or delegate to node operators on the platform, they can earn LPT tokens as a reward. Staking and node operation, both of which need LPT, are also ways for users to earn the fees paid in ETH.

Staking: Users can stake LPT tokens to protect the network against assaults and earn LPT tokens as a reward.

Governance: LPT token holders have the ability to propose and vote on network governance decisions.

Dual Mining: Users who stake to run GPU-backed Livepeer nodes can also mine additional GPU-based cryptocurrencies at the same time without interrupting their transcoding.

Token Distribution

There was no token sale for the Livepeer initiative. Instead, the community was given an initial allocation of LPT at genesis, which could then be used to stake as a transcoder or delegator. A Merkle mining mechanism was utilized to generate and distribute tokens. Users produce LPT in this process by submitting a Merkle proof proving they were part of the genesis state, which means they had at least 0.1 ETH in their account at a given block number. Users could only submit their proofs and generate their tokens during the initial stage, which began on May 1, 2018, known as the slow start.

On July 26, 2018, 3rd party mining became enabled, allowing users to submit proofs on behalf of other users who had yet to earn their token to share the remaining LPT. The tokens were divided between the user who submitted the proof (caller) and the person for whom the evidence was provided (receiver) based on an algorithm that raised the share awarded to the caller over time. On October 2, 2018, the genesis LPT was delivered, totalling 6,343,700 units. In addition to the 6,343,700 LPT distributed to the community, the founders and early team kept 1,235,000 LPT (vesting over 36 months), 1,900,000 LPT was sold in a pre-sale (vesting over 18 months), 500,000 LPT was put into a long-term development fund, and 21,300 LPT was given as a grant to a few early advisors and contributors.

LPT is inflationary since more LPT is produced regularly as a reward for transcoders' verification and transcoding labour. The protocol specifies an inflationary timetable for token issuance. As a result, network engagement, whether through transcoding or delegation, is required to avoid being inflated away.

Governance

The Livepeer protocol's governance role is three-fold: Determine whether common funds slashed from misbehaving nodes should be burned or appropriated. To ensure a robust, thriving network that is valuable to broadcasters, adjust network parameters. Proposed protocol modifications should be invoked in a decentralized manner.

Why is Livepeer needed?

Networks like Ethereum enable IPFS/Filecoin, and trustless computing to enable decentralized storage and content distribution. Bitcoin and various token projects facilitate p2p value transfer, and decentralized name registries like ENS and Blockcstack which provide human accessible names to content and identities, the vision of a decentralized web has begun to take shape in recent years.

These aspects lay the groundwork for decentralized applications (DApps) to be constructed as primarily static or infrequently updated online or mobile content. Still, DApps cannot currently add streaming media and data in an open and decentralized manner. The Livepeer project aims to decentralize internet-based live video streaming. The Livepeer Project gives a good overview of the present state of online live video. This article will focus on the Livepeer cryptoeconomic protocol features rather than the business case. However, in short, the current state of live streaming is described as rapidly increasing, centralized, and expensive.

In a truly decentralized P2P solution, nodes contribute their processing and bandwidth in streaming live video, which would be more open and scalable. The number of connections that could be serviced would be unlimited. To some extent, this technology is available. Still, there has been no incentive to encourage users to run nodes that provide this functionality, nor has there been adequate funding for developing a protocol that facilitates the entire internet rather than a single centralized company.

With the recent emergence of crypto token-powered protocols, there is now an opportunity to simultaneously incentivize users to contribute computation and bandwidth to live video broadcast in a way that aligns with funding the development of an open media server solution capable of delivering live-streamed video based on all the latest set standards and formats required to reach the full range of devices. Furthermore, the economic behaviours associated with token-powered protocols suggest that the cost to the broadcaster of using the Livepeer network could be less than the cost of any centralized alternative.

Use Cases

Pay-As-You-Go Basis

With a transfer of value transaction built into the protocol, broadcasters can now charge viewers directly to consume their live broadcast, without the need for a credit card, account, or centralized control over user identity. This has applications in education (paying to attend an online course), events (paying to watch a concert or live sporting event), entertainment (paying to watch a gamer or performer's live stream), and a variety of other areas - all while maintaining the viewer's privacy and allowing them to pay directly to the broadcaster for only what they consume.

Social Video Services with Auto-Scaling

Scaling infrastructure to accommodate the need for an increasing number of streams and customers as new users are added is one of the challenges of today's consumer video services. Infrastructure developers who provide provisioning servers, licencing media servers, and efficiently manage resources to handle spikes will appreciate a service layer that allows developers to quickly start building their video solution on top of the Livepeer Network, which will automatically scale to support any number of streams and viewers as they go.

Uncensored Live Reporting

Current platforms like Twitter and Facebook offer great live video solutions for reaching a vast audience. Still, they're also the first to be stopped or censored in various political crises. Using a decentralized network like Livepeer, it would be practically hard to keep the public in the dark about what's happening on the ground in real-time.

Video Dapps

The Ethereum ecosystem is significantly driving the development of decentralized apps (DApps). However, due to WebRTC's limitations, there hasn't been a feasible method for embedding live video within a DApp without relying on a centralized solution or limiting the number of consuming clients.

Conclusion

The Livepeer protocol encourages nodes to offer their processing power and bandwidth to the network in exchange for the ability to transcode and distribute live video. The verification of work is handled via a scalable extension built on top of the Truebit protocol, which incentivizes nodes to complete transcoding operations correctly to receive fees and token allocations and maintain their value-generating function as a transcoder.

The economics of delegated proof of stake block reward accounting is used to overcome the gamification of the network and the falsework problem. It becomes more cost-effective to stake one's tokens in a value-adding node rather than pay fees into the network to be distributed to other delegators when performing work without real demand.

The end product is a scalable, pay-as-you-go network for decentralized live video broadcasting, which Livepeer hopes will fill a need in the web3 stack.