One of the challenges that open protocols built on blockchain technologies face are how to best demonstrate their usage and adoption. Projects are often compared by abstract concepts like number of transactions, total value locked, amount staked, number of token holders, or even token price — all of which allow arbitrary comparisons between projects, but none of which tells the full story of real adoption. The Livepeer community has always built with practicality in mind, trying to deliver a network which is useful to video developers building streaming applications. …

One of the core value propositions of decentralized technologies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum is often stated as censorship resistance. Some have gone so far as to say that it’s the only value proposition that matters and determines whether a decentralized system can be advantageous relative to a centralized one, because otherwise the extra costs and complexity of using such systems wouldn’t be worth it relative to efficient centralized alternatives. With the current events unfolding in the world, and the centralized platforms responses to these events being to ban users and limit what may be communicated, many have looked to…

Livepeer’s video streaming infrastructure requires a global network of node operators contributing their compute and bandwidth to video encoding tasks. A grant proposal was recently approved to run an experimental bonus LPT incentive program that rewards node operators who perform well on the performance leaderboard. It’s targeting node operators running setups that can transcode video faster than realtime on the Livepeer network, which likely means those with GPUs. This program will reward 21,000 LPT over the next three weeks to node operators.

What do you need to know to participate?

• Run an orchestrator/transcoder node on the Livepeer network.
• Score at…

The Livepeer explorer now includes a performance leaderboard for node operators. Check it out, and learn more about it in this post and the FAQ.

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One of the most critical things for the Livepeer community to address in the coming months is to ensure that there’s better alignment between those doing useful video transcoding work on the network, and the rewards that are earned through protocol token rewards and fees. …

A little over four years ago Eric Tang and I began diving deeply into the world of blockchain enabled technologies, and were inspired by the web3 vision of a more decentralized, user-sovereign internet infrastructure. We published many of our early ideas and open source development work at dappbench.com, and laid out the vision and technical research for Livepeer — a protocol, incentive model, and open source software which could enable an open video infrastructure that was far more scalable, reliable, and cost effective than the centralized services that existed in the web2 world.

In the years that we’ve been at…

Today we are excited to showcase a web3 application called File.video, which aims to provide decentralized video hosting for everyone.

The functionality of this app is simple but powerful. Users can choose a video file to upload, and they’ll receive back a playback URL from which the video can be shared and viewed. Behind the scenes the video is transcoded into different bitrates to enable playback on varying connection speeds, and served over the HLS protocol for a reliable viewing experience across device types.

What is of particular note however, is that this application was built on web3 infrastructure —…

Livepeer is a video infrastructure network that enables developers to access capabilities, such as video transcoding, which are necessary to create live streaming applications with high reliability and affordable pricing, at scale. The Livepeer Token (LPT) is an Ethereum ERC-20 token issued by the network to provide security, route work, and incentivize active participation in the various roles required for the network to operate.

For an introduction to Livepeer at a high level, check out this great visual primer. For a full overview of the details behind these incentives, view The Livepeer Whitepaper and the Streamflow Scaling Update Paper, which…

The Livepeer video infrastructure network uses the Ethereum blockchain in order to secure work, settle payments, and incentivize people all around the world to provide their infrastructure for video encoding work. One of the promises of the Streamflow scaling update back in January, 2020, was that as Ethereum became more expensive to use, Livepeer video infrastructure itself would not become more expensive.

As this post is being published in September, 2020, the costs to use Ethereum are at an all time high — almost 500 times higher than they were at the genesis of Livepeer. And while broadcasting costs on…