About
Livepeer is a scalable Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for startups and organizations looking to add live or on-demand video to their offerings. At its core, Livepeer is an Ethereum-based protocol for video transcoding, which refers to the reformatting of a video to suit a variety of bandwidths and devices. Designed to make streaming more reliable while reducing costs, Livepeer acts as a decentralized marketplace for developers building applications that integrate live video and transcoding providers. The network’s native token is the Livepeer Token (LPT).
At its core, Livepeer seeks to offer a scalable and cost-effective infrastructure solution to meet today’s demand for streaming. Beyond accounting for 80% of internet bandwidth consumption, video streaming is also highly costly on the computing side, mainly because video distributors must first transcode video before broadcasting it. The resulting costs have meant that many video streaming companies have resorted to selling user data and subjecting users to ads to earn revenue to pay their infrastructure bills. Livepeer seeks to offer a decentralized, token-incentivized, and open network to replace this model — and claims that it can reduce costs up to 50x compared to legacy methods.
The Livepeer network currently performs one type of work very well: adaptive bitrate video transcoding. This is an important, hard-to-scale, compute-heavy task that developers of video streaming platforms need to use to ensure their streams can reach every user regardless of device type or connection speed.
Livepeer - A 10 minute primer is the easiest way to start learning about the Livepeer protocol.
Media Network + Livepeer
Livepeer integrates easily with Media Network. Livepeer is an excellent protocol to transcode videos and make them available in multiple resolutions in a decentralized way. Still, it lacks a critical component: a way to deliver the streams to end-users quickly and efficiently.
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is needed to serve these transcoded videos to end-users browsing a website or using an application leveraging Livepeer’s transcoding tech. This section will show how to setup a broadcaster, stream to it and then serve it to end-users through Media Network's CDN.
Check out our Livepeer Integration: The Missing Link blog post for more info.