The beginning of the year for Livepeer has been marked by excitement about the future, important community votes, and a celebration of some of Livepeer’s outstanding grant recipients along with their innovative video ideas.

Curious to hear more? Then read on!

The Road to AI Video Compute

In mid-January, CEO Doug Petkanics laid out an ambitious set of steps that will make it possible in the not-too-distant future for open AI developers to tap into the thousands of GPUs on the network for low-cost, pay-as-you-go compute.

With AI set to transform the future of video, open infrastructure has a pivotal role – particularly if we are to prevent yet another Big Tech monopoly play.

The Livepeer community's strong endorsement for establishing and funding a Special Purpose Entity (SPE) marks the initial phase towards validating the network's cost-efficiency and reliability in providing AI computing functionalities.

More exciting changes lie ahead. Stay up to date on where we take this next by joining the discussion on the #ai-video channel in the Livepeer Discord.

Applause for Livepeer Grantees

We put our hands together for two more Livepeer grant recipients in January.

First, there’s Carlton, who’s building a suite of Livepeer-supported components that will slash latency in Decentraland from 10-20 seconds to less than one. With Decentraland ULL, real-time streaming will at last be possible in Web3’s most popular virtual world.

Find out more about Decentraland Ultra Low Latency here.

Then there’s the KinoraSDK, a software developer kit (SDK) that will make it easy for anyone to create engaging video quests on Web3 social platforms such as Lens Protocol. Creator Emma-Jane McKinnon-Lee McKinnon said the partnership with Livepeer was essential to the success of the KinoraSDK, and not just for funding reasons.

“It wouldn’t make sense to do this without Livepeer,” she said. “Video communicates more, and does it better than any other form of content.”

Interested in setting up your own video-rich social quest? Read the KinoraSDK here.

Big Fish Turned to Livepeer Studio

Did you catch Fishtank Live Season 2?

If not, you should have. The brainchild of comic and actor Sam Hyde, Fishtank Live is a groundbreaking 24-7 interactive video TV show whose first season attracted more than 600,000 viewers. Season 2 has leveraged Livepeer's robust global infrastructure network through Livepeer Studio to deliver its great content.

Livepeer in the Media

On January 12th, Cointelegraph turned to Doug for insights into the AI-driven escalation in demand for computing power.

In an interview with reporter Savannah Fortis, Doug stressed the importance of the Open AI movement and said that keeping compute affordable and accessible was critical if we are to stop Big Tech’s dominance of AI’s future.

Missed it? Don’t worry. You can read the full piece here.

Adventures at FOSDEM

The Livepeer team recently attended FOSDEM in Brussels on February 3rd and 4th, , where software developers from all over the world met and shared great ideas.

On February 3rd, Livepeer’s Head of Ecosystem Development Shannon Wells led a discussion on “Cost-Effective AI Processing with Open Source Infrastructure”.

While on the 4th of February Eli Mellon shared his insights on "Livepeer Catalyst and The Conspiracy to Solve Video for Everybody Forever". The event concluded with the team hosting a meet-up with folks from Open Media and AI & Machine Learning dev rooms at Market Bar for beers and food.

Helping Build the Future at ETHDenver

We’ll have plenty more to say in next month’s roundup about ETHDenver (it starts February 23rd), but we can reveal this much: Livepeer is proud to again be a sponsor of one of the coolest innovation festivals around! Livepeer team members will be speaking, hacking, and building throughout ETHDenver around the areas of video streaming and AI video compute.

What better reason could you have to head out to Denver?