Building a Blockchain Streaming Tech Business Case

If you look at the top five industries that blockchain developers want to disrupt, streaming video and music will be somewhere on the list.

The core of blockchain-based streaming and content sharing firms like D.Tube, Dlive and Theta are trying to compete with giants like YouTube and Twitch with decentralized networks that give content providers much more freedom from corporate control and censorship.

They take far less revenue, and in many cases reward not only creators for producing, but users for viewing, reviewing and recommending streamers’ work. There is also a focus on transparent promotion algorithms and tools.

The basics are pretty simple – peer-to-peer platforms built on blockchain and using native cryptocurrencies for payments – and some big names have tested the waters. In 2020, Dlive brought (since retired) #1 YouTuber PewDiePie to its live streaming platform, giving the service 2 million new viewers in a month.

Other top platforms include D.Tube, an ad-free sharing service whose tokens can be earned by watching, sharing and commenting on videos as well as by uploading them.

Twitch targeting Stacked is after the gamer market. It raised $13 million in August for streaming gamer content that pays creators in governance tokens that give them influence over how the platform is run, TechCrunch said.

Theta’s peer-to-peer model encourages decentralized hosts to set up the streaming infrastructure in exchange for the same THETA tokens that viewers can use to reward creators.

“Our vision is for end users to see themselves less as consumers of a service, and more as participants in a network that benefits everyone involved,” Wes Levitt, Theta Labs’ chief strategy officer, told CryptoSlate in February. “With more options to distribute video through decentralized networks like Theta, creators can better control content distribution and retain more revenue.”

Beyond entertainment

However, there are uses of blockchain streaming video that go beyond broadcasting movies, documentaries, influencer videos and game reviews.

Eluvio, a blockchain distribution and monetization company that has partnerships with Fox, MGM Studios and the Black Eyed Peas, among others, sees its technology being used for more than just getting content in front of audiences.

In early 2021, MGM began testing the Eluvio Content Fabric for business-oriented applications. One was ROAR Screeners, a secure B2B streaming platform that allowed the entertainment company to host encrypted screenings of movies and TV shows for potential buyers.

Another, ROAR Pre-Release focused on pre-release 4K views that can be individually watermarked and encrypted, and controlled by digital rights management (DRM). ROAR Marketing provided 1.5 million images, TV and film clips, logos and other content to marketing licensees. And MGM Licensing was a content discovery tool that allows marketers to build their own clips from the studio’s content library.

Along with content streaming, Eluvio can create APIs and utility service layers for middlemen

“You can think of it as a decentralized SaaS, a service to replace CDNs, clouds and media stacks and provide native tokenizing capabilities,” Eluvio CEO Michelle Munson told IBC in September. “These types of models represent a new wave of what we think of as the window of value of content

Then there are costs. Doug Petkanics, CEO of decentralized streaming infrastructure provider Livepeer, pointed to the cost of transcoding — converting video into viewable formats like MPEG-4 or MOV needed by various platforms — in an interview for Dell’s blog in February.

It can cost as much as $3 an hour when you work through providers like Amazon Cloud Services, he said, adding that “giant tech monopolies that run the infrastructure for live streaming demand a price that is prohibitive for the emerging creative economy.”

Livepeer allows anyone with extra computing power to sign up and earn increased revenue by offering the encoding in a way that’s available to streaming sites not as big as Twitch and YouTube—wrapping the encoding costs into the high fees they impose on their content. creators using their network.

For all PYMNTS crypto coverage, subscribe to the daily Crypto newsletter.

New PYMNTS study: How consumers use digital banks

A PYMNTS survey of 2,124 US consumers shows that while two-thirds of consumers have used FinTechs for some aspect of banking, only 9.3% call them their primary bank.