Required Reading at FWB FEST 2023
- Shannon Wells, Head of Ecosystem, Livepeer
In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan famously wrote “the medium is the message”: the channel through which content is carried holds as much, if not more value, than the content itself. McLuhan’s theory of the interplay between culture and technology, written for the 1960s electronic age of television, is even more important to consider today. Television now has a ubiquitous, global broadcast channel - the internet - which is increasingly being shaped by public blockchain technology and an emergent culture of digital entrepreneurship. What becomes possible when individuals are able, not only to own their own content, but the means of production and distribution of that content as well? This is the future Livepeer has been building since launching the world’s first open, onchain video protocol in 2017. Let’s dive in to the real possibilities for distribution, monetization and collaboration unlocked by web3.
The Internet is Video
Content on the web has evolved from static text to a broad range of interactive media. Today, video accounts for 80% of internet traffic. It’s easy to understand why: video is one of the most authentic and powerful ways to engage online. Over half of consumers say that watching videos makes them more confident in their purchasing decisions and 91% of businesses use video as a marketing tool. With an ever growing range of tools for digital content creation and enhancement, including AR, VR and generative AI in media, the global video streaming market is experiencing massive growth expected to reach nearly half a trillion dollars by 2030.
Today, only a few centralized cloud providers like Amazon, Google and Meta have the computing resources needed to deliver online video at a global scale. This monopoly has allowed internet companies to develop extractive business models that rely on consumer data and take an ever larger share of revenue from creators on their platforms. As global demand for video accelerates, a more equitable, scalable solution is needed. Levering a decentralized global network, Livepeer is able to provide significantly lower cost, more scalable and reliable infrastructure to process and deliver video to any device, anywhere in the world. In fact, using Livepeer as a developer for all your video needs is 5-10x cheaper than web2 providers. Learn about how the Livepeer Protocol works here and explore the Livepeer docs here.
Video’s Onchain Moment
Blockchains enable us to permissonlessly create new asset types and asset markets. During the 2021 NFT boom “digital creators used the blockchain to create a whole new art scene” with considerable financial returns for digital images. A cryptographic proof - a contract address - guaranteed that the collector was the sole holder of a “minted” one-of-a-kind digital item. But today, onchain media goes deeper than just THE ONE minting and trading NFTs. An NFT’s contract address also describes the “offchain” content that gives an NFT life, such as a name, description, image, video, and other “metadata”. The token itself is just a container for data after all. All of this data is content addressed using (using a content identifier, or CID), meaning the URI pointing to that content (“ipfs://…”) is completely unique, making it trustlessly verifiable what content an NFT is associated with.
While content addressable systems like IPFS and Arweave can store data ensuring this content can always be accessed, streaming video with reliability and scalability is another matter. But it’s time we evolve to address this, as video NFTs already become more important, and NFTs continue to become more dynamic, interactive and complex.
For video NFTs, Livepeer maintains the metadata, while acting as a "video acceleration layer" to transcode, cache, and deliver the video with its decentralized global infrastructure. For Livepeer, onchain media includes context in which a piece of content - a song, a video, an image, a document - was created and evolves over time. Through onchain provenance tracing, Livepeer makes it possible to link an original video with future enhancements to that original video content. Because we all know publishing one video is just the beginning of a piece of content’s journey online (as seen by the continued expansion of remix culture proliferated by apps like TikTok)
Provenance Tracking & Verifiable Video
How developers reference videos in metadata is important because if they are referenced in a way that no other application can understand or handle then we limit who can build experiences around the videos. If the link to the video can break, then that prevents further experience building! This is why to date, remixing can only be controlled in the context of one single app experience. To move beyond this, we need to reliably associate information at the asset level.
What if we need additional qualities later on for additional bandwidth and device combinations? What if we want to add subtitles later on? What if we want to upscale the video to “restore” it to a quality that previously was not achievable?
How do we reconcile the desire to have verifiable data linked with metadata *and* the desire to enhance the video experience now and in the future?
We think one way to reconcile these two points is with an approach of applying video compute on top of decentralized storage. Decentralized storage establishes a shared, open (universally accessible) verifiable (identified by hash) data layer and video compute produces a variety of video formats and renditions from the same source data. We believe that this approach can be taken with any decentralized storage layer - whether IPFS, Arweave, Storj, Swarm, or others. Content hashes (CIDs on IPFS) are metadata as shared verifiable data.
CIDs in metadata establish a root of verifiable data (hash of the data) that can be built on by others. CIDs serve as the original reference to content that is shared. Additional renditions (different qualities, filtered versions, etc.) of the original content for a CID can be created by applying compute transformations.
Checkout our public R&D on verifiable video here including our experimental developer tool for building creator signed video into your application
Why this Matters: Ownable and Programmable Media
Why does verifiable media matter? First, it can help consumers decide what content is trustworthy (i.e. has an original piece of content been tampered with or is a deep fake created by AI)? Second, it can enable new economic opportunities for creator monetization. (From social consensus about “crediting” the creator of a viral dance on TikTok to direct royalty splits).
Digital content is now “ownable” through “onchain” property rights. The creator who mints an NFT can make a verifiable claim to own the content of that NFT. The creator's work is the creator's property. Every onchain platform can easily read, index and showcase that content. As a result, creators can take their content from one online application to another, effectively becoming their own platform. This also creates more competition at the application layer, which ultimately benefits the creators and their audiences.
Another implication is that content, for the first time, becomes truly "programmable". This opens up the possibility of more ownership types, ways of interacting with content, and financialization for every piece of content. Onchain media allows the creator to be paid for their work directly by their fans. This is important because it incentivizes different types of creative work based on the fan's desire, instead of currently, doing work for the benefit of the platform.
Onchain media doesn't mean "public by default". Creators have full control over their content - who has access, who owns it, and who can monetize it. Onchain media allows permissionless innovation on public content and shared tooling. This means creators can share, remix, and create with more at their disposal. The addition of new asset types and asset markets can help expand the economic pie.
Blockchains give us the ability not only to point to where a piece of content first came to life, but also to track its evolution and the moments that shape it. This enables different apps to build different experiences around the same asset. This is especially important as we begin to watch IP outlast the interfaces upon which they were brought to life. In a game or metaverse world, the introduction of new assets into the world should allow other developers to build around those assets to continue expanding the world. In a music context, it should allow for remixing, in a social context, for curation.
A New Generation of Digital Entrepreneurship
Livepeer is most focused on enabling and delivering technical solutions to unlock the opportunities of a new onchain Creator Economy, including new media formats that are uniquely enabled by blockchain. Imagine a trophy asset in a game that comes attached with an instant video replay of the victory. What if I as a developer want to build an extension of the game client where the player that holds the trophy asset can enter a special zone where the instant video replay of the victory is played back in a virtual movie theater?
Some of the use cases Livepeer is considering in the development of technical standards and solutions:
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Content co-creation through onchain incentives, and multiparty signing, enabled by video provenance
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Collective funding of video content creation, curation, or distribution
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Community ownership of video content
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Incentivized content remixing with automatic onchain settlement / value flow
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Social media content authenticity through web3 identity and reputation
At the recent Broadcast summit in Paris, the second in our event series welcoming onchain media enthusiasts to gather and discuss the future of adoption, we uncovered that one such thing that blockchain excels at is coordinating multiplayer games.
And now we’re on a quest to determine: What types of engaging media formats can emerge from these multiplayer games, that are both fun to contribute to, fun to consume, and rewarding for both creators and consumers?
Build the Future on Onchain Video applications with Livepeer
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For Video Innovators:
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Find us on:
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For Developers:
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Get started for free by signing up at livepeer.studio, your all-in-one dashboard for building, broadcasting, and publishing video on the open internet
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Get funding for your project. We are looking for the next generation of builders and partners to disrupt the future of video. Apply for our grants program
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For Creators:
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Get started with one of the apps in the Livepeer Ecosystem
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StreamETH
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RadRadio
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Orb
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Lenstube
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Bonfire
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Beem
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The Lot Radio
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