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How could viewers stream money directly to performers on the Infinite Digital Stage? #8

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criticaltv opened this issue Jan 16, 2020 · 0 comments

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criticaltv commented Jan 16, 2020

Summary

This issue is the consolidation of a few different tracks in these repos, and in private / public conversations.

All the paths lead towards the following primary goal:

Creating the best mechanism for viewers of livestreaming content to pay directly to the creators of livestreaming content. Paying directly to the independent individual creators that you watch, that you like, cutting out the middleman, disintermediating the existing mass-market media, and creating a new way for attention and value to be exchanged around the world - in real time, and funded by the consumers of independent content creators. With a new incentive to share their live creativity for your listening / viewing pleasure.

Core Infrastructure - Livepeer on Ethereum.

Obviously I would start with Livepeer - who are starting to build the core of a decentralised livestreaming network. It's rock solid, and has a growing and engaged following.

And with Probabilistic Micropayments working on Ethereum mainnet, this seems a strong candidate for providing the economic and video infrastructure backbone.

Perhaps even one day Delegators can stake to a Broadcaster and get a share of the earnings - a bit like voting up your favourites by streaming money to them, as they stream live unedited real-news to you.

Let's not also forget, that the opportunity for "cross-pollinating" in the Ethereum ecosystem is very strong, and there are likely to be opportunities which nobody has even conceived yet.

Other Major Ethereum Projects which may support such innovation:

Maybe @OrchidProtocol even solves this problem from the base level up: if you're the source of the data, then people end up paying more Probabilistic Micropayments to you as the source?

And perhaps Ocean Protocol @trentmc have some way of withholding content without having a token. To be discussed.

I would like to see Probabilistic Micropayment solutions using Multi-Collateral DAI - to create some kind of standard for streaming money - could be useful in DeFi, huh @makerdao?

And then there are projects like Connext, Sablier, Uphold, as ways to subscribe, to set up drip-feeding money, and also streaming money over a layer-2 network.

And burner wallets - to run small pocket change experiments.

How?

First, we must make a way to serve the video content.

The folks at Livepeer are quite well up on that, and have built a decentralised video transcoding network - so you can pay a GPU owner to "squish" video from e.g. 1920x1080 pixels, into e.g. 256x144 pixels - means less data, means easier to watch in the far reaches of the "modern" internet. It's working, and increasingly scalable.

From this Livepeer, came the Infinite Digital Stage - which you are watching just by reading this. It's a stage. A digital stage. And it's infinite. You heard me right. Infinite.

We've got an Infinite Digital Stage running on a little server in Germany, you can watch the test signal with this command:

ffplay http://52.29.226.43:8935/stream/hello_world/P144p30fps16x9.m3u8

(or stream the URL using your stream player of choice, I like VLC)

Screenshot from 2020-01-16 02-30-32

So, this is a pretty solid, and "independently empowering" base infrastructure for a new world of media sharing.

End User Product

So, with Ethereum and Livepeer as a economic and video infrastructure backbone, we need to build something that people could actually use. People like my Mum. Or my Dad. Or my nephew. Or my girlfriend.

Progress so far

My preference is on starting small, and incrementing very carefully. Here was the spec and the project delivered by @mul1sh from @gitcoin: #2

Our starting point was to create the simplest of video player applications.

Our first foray was the simplest of video livestream player apps - which

  • tap icon to turn channel on
  • tap screen to turn channel off

It was a single-channel app, using the open-source app templates for iOS and Android - published here - please feel free to use.

We deployed the Android app to Google Play ourselves: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.videodac.hls - do try it if you have an android device.

Research results

So, we've researched a number of areas:

  • iOS > tvOS > watchOS - so, our primary track for mobile is Android over iOS, because of lower barrier to entry, and greater proliferation outside rich countries. HOWEVER: by developing iOS, you also go down the track of tvOS apps, and even wow watchOS... watching livestream on your watch WTF? So, let's not ignore the Apple route to value... but I don't have Apple stuff, someone else should pick this up. Streaming Livepeer onto Apple TV like WTF? More about that is here: https://github.com/videoDAC/apps/issues/4

Then there is work being pursued by @mul1sh - videoDAC/android#3

And some thoughts written up, as an extension to the simple livestream app - some ideas on UX / UI - for review and feedback here: videoDAC/android#5 - getting these simple UX / UI ideas running on Android, Chromecast, iOS, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV... and with multi channel just another integration away... then we would have power to the individual.

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