About Livepeer

What is Livepeer?

Livepeer is a decentralized service designed to minimize infrastructure costs for streaming or on-demand video applications.

It's not a consumer-facing video platform per se; it's not a decentralized alternative to Twitch or YouTube. Instead, it's a behind-the-scenes solution for app creators that distributes the task of transcoding video (or converting it from one format to another before playing it) among participating computers on a network.

The company says it can reduce resource costs by up to 50 times compared to traditional centralized video transcoding methods.

How does Livepeer work?

Livepeer relies on its "transcoders," or people who add computers to the network to handle the code conversion needs of application developers as needed. These people exchange their computing resources (CPU, CPU, and bandwidth) in exchange for payment in cryptocurrency, and Livepeer also refers to these users as "video miners," which is consistent with the terminology used for mining to create block work on many other blockchain platforms (e.g., Bitcoin).

Developers using the Livepeer network to power their video applications must pay LPT fees for transcoding and distribution services. In addition, LPT holders can pledge their tokens to an encoder to become a delegate, thereby earning a smaller share of fees and rewards for participating in the network without being directly involved in the transcoding process.

According to CoinGecko, in the days following the March 2021 announcement of the grayed-out Livepeer Trust, the price of Livepeer's LPT tokens spiked by nearly 4,501 TP3T.

What's so special about Livepeer?

Video streaming is expensive for app developers. It's one of those hidden costs that consumers may not be able to see or understand directly, but which can be transferred to them in the form of service fees for increased ad placement or the sale of their data.

By minimizing these costs through distributed computing, Livepeer can enable new types of video-driven applications and business models. On the other hand, people can contribute their computing power and earn fees and rewards in the process.

What can you do with Livepeer?

Livepeer is not a consumer-oriented service, so users who watch transcoded videos on the Livepeer network may not have any indication of participation in the service.

For application developers, Livepeer offers a potentially cheaper alternative to centralized services, thus reducing the computational cost of implementing video functionality in their services. For network participants, it is necessary to connect your computer to the network and/or pledge LPT tokens to help ensure liquidity.

As of March 2021, Livepeer has launched a "joint mining" pilot program with decentralized storage platform Filecoin, which allows users to mine and earn rewards on both platforms.

pending

Livepeer's success will likely depend on its ability to scale to meet demand. If its distributed network can provide a similar quality of service to centralized alternatives at a fraction of the cost, it could become a credible option as Web3 applications and platforms grow in popularity. As of March 2021, it's still a relatively small network, with about 47 transcoders connected to the network.Eric Tang, Livepeer's CTO, tweeted within the same month that the service had transcoded more than 1.6 million minutes of video in the past 30 days.

But Livepeer isn't the only service trying to use decentralization to address the high cost of streaming video. theta is the most recognizable service of its kind, but it takes a different approach, using extra user bandwidth to help provide liquidity to other users, rewarding you with theta tokens in exchange for your bandwidth. videoCoin bills itself as the "the Airbnb of video," and it's closer to Livepeer in its approach. it distributes computing tasks among connected nodes on a network. There are also more generalized decentralized computing power-sharing networks available for video needs (e.g., rendering), such as Golem.

Livepeer's ultimate goal is to be completely decentralized, but is currently managed by the legal entity that created the network, Livepeer Inc. The 2017 roadmap, which Livepeer's official FAQ now describes as "slightly outdated," shows at a high level how the network will eventually scale and gradually move away from its centralized elements. away from its centralized elements.

As the Web3 market grows and matures, decentralized infrastructure services will prove to be very valuable. Gray is betting that Livepeer will be one of the services that help change the streaming video market, and the trust vote may help Livepeer stand out and attract more app developers looking to enter the decentralized web.

December 8, 2022 - Livepeer has been integrated with Aptos.