Livepeer 📚 Building Live Streaming Apps w/Livepeer

live pier who's gonna give a presentation on the present and future of streaming with live pier if you have questions during the talk and you're in the zoom chat drop the question in the chat box and i will relay them at the end of the talk awesome i'll let you take it away thanks eric thank you heather uh well thank you everyone for being here today uh even though we're doing a remote event i can feel the energy from from other hackers uh especially in the discord asking questions and talking to each other really good to see um all the all the fun hacks that you guys are working on um today i want to you know give a quick talk about the present and future of streaming with lifebear so i will start with a little bit of a quick demo just to show you kind of some easy uh easy ways to get started building stuff with live here and then i'll get into kind of uh the current state of how i think about um uh streaming with life here and decentralized video live streaming in general and then get into a little bit of the cool future stuff uh at the end and of course leave plenty of time to to for you to ask any questions so um i'm going to dive in here to do a quick web demo so this is a a demo application that's built by a community member in lifebear this and this really quickly shows off just how easy it is to to build with life here so this is a a you know very simple react app um this you you can go and enter your api key which you can get at lifebear.com and even anybody can sign up and get an api key once you do that you can click create stream uh and now a stream has been created well you see that nothing there's nothing streaming right now because we haven't started the stream yet so the stream is idle but what i can do is i can use a piece of video broadcasting software to broadcast the stream uh so today i'm going to use obs which is the most popular kind of streaming software for uh for a broadcasting platform like a twitch or youtube but um in fact you can use anything um in fact zoom is another a good tool for you to broadcast video um and and um you can definitely like i can show you how to do it if you're interested so for for our sake i'm going to go to obs and so this is what i have here i'm going to go to settings and go to the stream um stop the stream so my ongoing stream right now i'm going to do this copy this stream key um paste it here okay and now i am starting to stream as you can see my stream has started down here it shows my my bitrate and all that good information and over here you see that our screen has started loading the live stream usually takes a little while to to get started in any in any platform this is the same and now you can see we can view the stream and in fact i can copy this url i can go to another um another video player right so let's say this is the hlsjs the test video player which is kind of the standard for any uh video player you can see that uh here we can we can watch the stream um a very simple way to get started right this is kind of the one of the easiest um easiest way you can in fact go there and fork the repo and then you can see how how the the interaction with the api is done is very simple and the next thing i wanted to quickly show you is a react native version this is this is kind of brand new uh it was actually built over the last week um so so now we can have a kind of a native mobile experience right so what i'm gonna do is i'm going to start my um i already cloned the repo as i'm going to start my simulator as you can see here uh we can we can already use this app i can i can go watch a stream i can input my url in fact i can i can come here start my stream again and i can just input the same url um and this should just work let me just see uh all right as you can see the video has started um and i can go in here and watch this stream it'll take a little bit but now see you can you can um we can now watch the stream in fact we can also broadcast the stream uh i have loaded it also on my phone um what and uh as you can see here i've loaded on my phone um i can go live um and yeah you can you can go through the you can go through the experience on your own pace but again uh this is an easy way to kind of get started you can again fork the repo and uh and quickly start live streaming with live gear um so let's talk about um why we're building this in the first place right um there's some interesting statistics uh as as everybody probably already knows covet while it's unfortunate um it has um quickly accelerated the growth of live video streaming on the internet uh between april 20 um 2019 and april 2020 uh the major live streaming platforms grew by 99 about 100 right so imagine twitch youtube live facebook live doubling uh in that in in a single year um it is also estimated that um the live streaming bandwidth on the internet in general will grow by over 400 percent between the year of 2017 to year 2022 and as of today traffic of video streaming on the internet is already around 70 of all the traffic right so with all this growth where is it going right of course we have the netflix we have the um you know we have the uh apple streaming we have the streaming we're happening right and and there's a lot of kind of we call it peak content but the other thing that's really interesting is growth of ugc content ugc stands for user generated content right and these are content these are live streams that um maybe a game maybe a gamer is is doing on twitch or any of the other platforms or it could be um a dj streaming their dj sets from home or at a venue it could be fitness use cases uh like an instructor teaching a class online it could be commerce cases like uh people selling things on the internet using live streaming right the list goes on and on uh if you look um at the kind of the consumption curve we have the over the top content um on the left and these are kind of the large big brands with um you know things like the nba streaming their content or um or the nfl streaming their content right and then over here on the right we have the ugc right so these are uh direct um you know everyday people like you and i we're streaming our we're streaming our video streams maybe we don't have a lot of viewers but there's a lot of us that are creating the streams right and and there comes an interesting dynamic which is for for the for the ott content for the professionals there's already business models built in there's already you know they're already doing advertising they're they're making money in that way but for people who are just getting started streaming it's very unclear how sustainable it is right a lot of times um these are passion projects creators um you know are doing this and they're trying to make a living some of them some of them just trying to trying to make good content right and and right now what we see is that all these big platforms like youtube and twitch are kind of gathering all of that traffic and monetizing on them right um it's um on average these platforms can take anywhere between uh 20 to 50 percent of the of the transaction and what they do is they basically run ads on your content right for the viewers uh for the fact that you can use their content uh content platform for free but you really making making money for them and they're taking a huge cut this growing trend um is opportunity for decentralized livestreaming right and what that means is we think the future of live streaming is uh streaming without the middleman streaming with uh for creators using tools rather than platforms that lock them in uh and using decentralized platforms uh to connect directly with their users so that they can become monetize their content better if they want to they can create a direct connection they don't have to worry about being the platform they don't have to worry about their fans living on a completely different location and that then they can be kicked out anytime right they should be able to own their own fans and so um you know this idea is not new right how come it hasn't happened before well it turns out that it's very very expensive to build video streaming platforms um if you have on average a thousand viewers uh with a platform of a thousand concurrent streams per month you spend up to millions of dollars a month just for running that infrastructure and life here is here to solve that problem uh one of the benefits of live pier is that we're able to cut the cost of transcoding and delivery by a huge margin how do we do that well we use a decentralized protocol that creates a two-sided marketplace for live streaming for like video transcoding everything is open source so people can um go in and modify the code and improve the platform um as they fit as if they see fit um they there's a there's a lot of participation from gpu cryptocurrency miners who have excess capacity uh that can come and they compete in the network which drives down the price so here's a you know a an example cryptocurrency mining rig right lots of gpus mining cryptocurrency uh and here's an example of a cryptocurrency farm where you know they're professional uh farmers with a good internet connection with lots of capacity in fact what they can do is um they combine cryptocurrency and do video processing at the same time on the same chips because um you know as you can see there's an architecture diagram of a nvidia nvidia gpu um these mvn can envy deck chips can only be used for video transcoding and they can't be used for anything else so in fact when uh the cryptocurrency miners are uh doing creative currency mining they're just leaving this trip's idle and by downloading lifeguard software uh they can participate in the live care uh network without sacrificing uh their trans uh their um their cryptocurrency mining infrastructure so um so life here has built this network uh there's a global registry that sits on ethereum uh and the broadcasters can come in and this register of cryptocurrency miners we call them orchestrators can work with the with the broadcasters and the broadcasters can pick whichever um orchestrator they want to use and all of this happens in a in a automated mostly off-chain manner to make it really scalable effective and what we did is we built a video streaming service on top of this network so that we take away all of the complexity of dealing with a protocol and just make it super simple for a developer to to use a set of apis and as a result we're able to cut down the cost from um three to six dollars down to about about 30 cents to 50 cents which is a huge saving so let's talk about some of the example users of life here right now right current in the current date what what are people doing uh let's go to uh this application called play dj we uh there this is a this is a dj streaming platform think of this as twitch for djs right uh anytime they can come here uh there's djs streaming their uh their sets you can go in and you can watch their performance this is a this is a dj that's streaming right now and you can see you can like their content you can even tip them if you want to uh really cool site um they're you know they have lots of competitors and the reason they're able to be uh to have a sustainable business model and and provide this great service for djs is because they are able to use life here another interesting example is vim.tv this is a blockchain project um and they're they're very similar they're similar to a twitch from a user experience experience perspective uh you know this is a kind of a ugc uh your typical ugc streaming website uh but there's a in-app uh economy in place where you can um you know tip people in tokens and things like that um again you can go into these streams you can you can watch you can watch these live streams and and they're all powered with uh life gear and uh and the other thing that's interesting is in fact uh if global.tv which we all uh love um i think is also used in life here right now uh right now right now they're just they're they're just playing uh vod uh but uh it when when the life uh when the life events is happening uh their strength uh karthik has switched over to using life here this time which is a cool which is cool thing for for us to see and the other example i want to quickly show you is this uh company called kokuma which is a live streaming e-commerce example where an e-commerce site can basically install a quick plug-in and they can have a live stream live stream e-commerce experience where someone can talk about the items on their site and they can have kind of a in-stream purchase experience and and this is a very popular form of commerce in asia which is making its way over to europe and the u.s so um yeah these are some quick examples of current life per users let's think about the future right the future of life uh live streaming the future of decentralized live streaming and the future of life here um what we're seeing right now is we're seeing a lot of activity in um nft right nfts are a great uh we're starting from um in in a format of artists uh selling their art uh on the internet um and so we're we're currently seeing a lot of nft drops for example the artist would say tomorrow i'm releasing a set of my art um at you know at noon uh so if you want you can come to the site um you know nifty gateway uh open c whatever that foundation right like there are these these applications uh and then you can do the nfd drop um but if you do that uh if you go there you know there's a countdown clock and you kind of buy the buy the nft and that's pretty much it there's actually a lot of interesting activities that are happening around the drop for example sometimes people do a clubhouse um event um and so people can the the buyers can can be talking to the um the artist at the same time so this is a great opportunity for live streams to also happen around these um these activities live stream being one of the most content-rich and most engaging media forms can make a huge difference for these types of nfp drops another thing is live streaming in dao coordination as we can see as we see lots of daos are getting started as of today all right these are decentralized autonomous organizations a group of people on the internet forming organization for a specific purpose right sometimes they are um in a discord sometimes they have a smart contract right for some specific purposes um but for every dell the interesting thing is that the dao is public by default right usually people can participate using um you know with some some kind of token mechanism but a lot of times these dowels would have to communicate to a large community these are a group of people communicating to a larger group of people and this happens all the time we think live streaming will uh will be a big um a big a big very important tool for dows in order to communicate to their communities in order to communicate to people who are interested in the doubt and finally we think live streaming in decentralized social networks is going to be very crucial as well uh these decentralized social networks are just getting started right now they're still in the format of um you know in kind of text format but we think video is going to be a a huge uh very very important thing uh in the future and we believe lifebeard can play a very important element in that so these are some of the interesting use cases right the other thing that lifetier is working on is to enable not only video streaming but also smart we call it smart av features on top of these video streaming applications so for example lots of times videos video platforms have other challenges including content moderation um you know imagine you are running uh you're running a game streaming site you probably don't want to you don't don't want people streaming like copyrighted content on your platform uh illegal things that can get you in trouble so or you want you want to be able to have people easily search the video using text right how do you do that so these are things that can be enabled with um with ai and live peer being being a gpu based transcoding mechanism i can easily plug into the ai the ai processing chips on the gpus and start doing automated content detection and doing automated object detection to apply metadata onto it onto the videos uh so to make them text searchable and these are all experiments that are already happening right now and we have uh we have lots of interesting research uh tracks uh and i think in the next six months or so you will start to see all these interesting um smart av features starting to pop up in the live peer ecosystem um i want to stop here and jump into the q a session uh because i know we have we have about a little less than 10 minutes left and i want to see what kind of questions that people have thanks eric that was a super great talk we have one question from victor in the chat oh we have oh couple actually first from sunny could you replace zoom like this with live pier that's a great question so usually um this is this is something that people ask me all the time live here currently is focused on one-to-many broadcast um and there's usually two there's two uh tech stacks uh in video streaming one is the rtc um you know kind of zoom style um real-time communication and the challenge there is that it's very expensive and it doesn't scale right you can have maybe you know 100 people using um using the same zoom chat zoom chat uh what life here addresses is when you when you have one person streaming to um hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands even millions of people right in that case um you cannot use a zoom style uh experience um there there there could be um there could be a fee the uh like zoom style chats can definitely be added to the live career tech stack but that's not what we're currently focused on right now uh in fact what you can do is um you can kind of composite the zoom the zoom video and then broadcast to a larger audience that's a very common uh feature that icp class for cool that makes sense okay i've got a question from victor how are the nodes incentivized to provide the resources for the streaming great question um so in the live peer protocol it's specified that uh because it's a two-sided marketplace imagine one side is the video the video application developers or the platforms that are powering the video application developers and on the other side are the you know cryptocurrency miners and gpu gpu providers uh the gpu providers will each set a price for the for the work that they're willing to do and then on the other side the users of those gpus can kind of pick um which which price works for them what's the quality of service that works for them and then kind of the automated transactions happen between them currently the gpu providers are paid in ethereum and in the future i think it'll probably be better for for them to be paid in stable tokens as well nice okay next question how soon will the smart av be ready for developer use ah um we are currently doing some um private pilots uh with um a few applications already so i would say definitely in the next six months um it will be it will become publicly available great and is there a way to feed webrtc video to live pier or should i do that conversion on my side yes that's also another very common um question currently life peer only takes in rtmp format um and and that you know that that that is not um does not support webrtc but we are we're actually interested in enabling that as well so i think um in the near future um we will want to kind of expand the amount uh the number of video protocols that life here supports awesome so that's it for questions in the chat maybe let's just do our last call for everyone um if you have any questions for eric drop them we get some thanks and we're getting some love on on youtube someone says the web through world is going to be so cool and i said it's already here that's right that's right we're actually seeing um you know just just from kind of the last weekend um and last week of kind of preparing for this event uh there's been a lot of interesting projects that have come to life here um this is actually one of the first hackathons that we we've participated in a while um and um and and you know there's people building kind of nfc drop applications like i talked about uh there's people uh i remember someone um was trying to build kind of a decentralized cameo where celebrities can connect directly with fans uh and they want um you know they want to use this um use live peer as kind of a a tool that streams these like comic cons or things like that that are happening around the world and have you know have celebrities able to like sell autographs on um on the ethereum blockchain and then be able to stream that out right that's such a powerful thing is it just really um i think it really points out that um you know a lot of times when when you're doing doing some kind of transaction right let's say some kind of non-defy transaction when you're buying something on the internet it's almost always more engaging when you have when you're talking to the person while you're doing that kind of transaction so i think as nft start to become more popular it's gonna expand to more than just digital arts right it's gonna um and the blockchain is gonna be facilitating a lot more types of transactions than you know d5 and our transaction and and i think when people are buying anything digital even when people are buying something physical um this type of video streaming live streaming style communication just makes the whole thing much more valuable much more engaging much more fun um and i think it creates a lot of this additional value alongside of that transaction for sure live pier is a part a vital component of that flywheel that's already in motion yeah yeah for sure and we see a lot of uh you know we see a lot of interesting uh momentum and interest coming from kind of this other um trend which is this creator this creator economy that's happening right lots of uh you know whether it's like journalists leaving their job go joining uh joining sub stack or it's um you know people uh kind of uh influencers starting to like really formalize and become their own businesses right like all of these uh all of these movements are kind of going towards web three right there you know you have kind of you kind of have your um your low value or or your fans who aren't willing to pay that much money uh on youtube or or or instagram or whatnot and then you have your high value fans buying your nft right and that's this is the same artist um and so so along the line live streaming can kind of create different um different values depending on the the type of fan that you're interacting with uh depending on the type of thing you're trying to do with the fan so we're still just seeing the very beginning of it and it's really exciting to uh to be kind of watching that and be and empowering these applications for sure it's all happening awesome thank you so much eric and thank you everyone for watching um we are at time now so i think we should wrap it there thanks again eric and the live pier team and thanks everyone for joining thank you heather um come find us on discord