Building with the Web3 Video Stack - Eric Tang

thanks thanks everybody for being here my name is eric tang and i'm the co-founder and cto at lifepier um today i'm going to talk to you a little bit about some of the opportunities in building web3 video-based applications i mean what does that even mean we haven't seen much video in web 3 but it's coming a little bit about us um we we're live pierre we've been building the video streaming infrastructure layer of web 3 since late 2016. so we've been at this for a while so today i'm going to cover just a little bit brief history of internet video platforms in general how they you know how they evolved over time talk about some primitives in web 3 video how that's different from the current status quo of video applications in general we'll talk a little bit about the opportunities in web 3 based video and finally i'll share some high-level tips about our developer toolkit okay brief history of internet video platforms this is not complete and very brief it kind of got kicked off back in 2005 when a small startup that was trying to build a dating app that's the video version of hot or not that application was not working and they needed to pivot so they decided to shut off the dating feature and just allow users to upload videos and that and at that time youtube was born the application quickly took off within 18 months beca became the fifth most popular website in the world and within that time became the fastest growing website the internet has ever seen some interesting facts about this this platform it was actually only independent for about two years think about that short amount of span they raised about 11 and a half million dollars spent most of that on infrastructure right before they were acquired they were spending about two million dollars a month on streaming infrastructure and you know combined with a lot of different reasons they were acquired by google by 2006 for 1.65 billion dollars subsequently they started their revshare which is the ad model putting ads in people's users videos in 2007 and sharing a percent of the revenue to the users and that's when this ad driven attention economy was born another example twitch started back in 2007 it was called justin.justin.tv it was a website for the founders to create a reality tv show where justin put a webcam in his baseball cap and just walked around with it all day filming every little detail about his life the company struggled for about four years they tried all different things and they got into all kinds of legal troubles they got sued by um by the but uh by the us government even uh they had to go in front of congress to testify uh for for a lot of copyright issues um because of that um the the growth was very much tapered until 2011 when they realized a small sub small subset of their audience who they thought was kind of a leech group they were streaming their video their video playing sessions on on their site uh and they decided nothing else is working what the hell let's give it give give that a try it quickly took off and they spun out that uh that that project into his own company um in 2011 and from there it started growing exponentially within three years they were acquired by amazon for a billion dollars at that time coincidentally it was the biggest acquisition that amazon had ever done it took 20 of their cash position uh and the and then they albeit google who is going to buy them and become kind of the live streaming portion of youtube third example that i'm going to give netflix netflix it was started as a dvd online rental business uh in 1997.

they won ipo in 2002 didn't launch their video streaming service until 2007 and it was largely inspired by the success of youtube um within within a quick three years their streaming business surpassed the dvd rental business and now you know dvd is no longer around um they also started the streaming war right the amount of capital that they're investing into content creation is enormous in 2000 in 2021 they spent 13.6 billion dollars creating content original content on the netflix platform and they account for about 20 of all the internet's traffic combined all right so you know quick lessons what are what are some of the things that we've learned in the last 15 you know 17 years of video streaming right well video streaming is driven by creators all of these platforms are just platforms that are putting video content on there whether they're they're spending money producing it or they're they're paying other people to produce it at the end of the day without these without these content these platforms would not exist um you know they're they're now spending an astronomical amount of money to get to incentivize people to create content but at the same time these are giant businesses that are taking a large portion of that revenue youtube famously take about half of the ads um at spend that are on the platform and you know give only half to the creators and the whole um and the whole transit transaction is very not transparent right you need to be above a certain amount of uh viewership to even be considered in uh to be in that group and as we all know the long tail of the internet is where most of the stuff happened so for a large portion of the viewership they're not paying the creators at all second things well internet video is now everywhere right videos in entertainment it's in education e-commerce personal and business communication it accounts for 80 of all the traffic on the internet so that's pretty incredible we can't make our way around the internet without video today and the third thing which i think is really really relevant to this audience is that video is highly centralized it's it's governed by these few platforms that have outsized power in this power dynamic right there is about 40 46 46 million um about 50 million creators around the world um out of that 50 million over 90 of the people are actually using these top few platforms to create uh to create video and to make a living off of that right and and as we as we as this audience start to discover um this unfairness in in the in the in the game uh they're starting to move to web three uh and and this is the opportunity for web three right we're starting to see uh video based use cases emerge in the web 3 space that are built as decentralized applications built on top of decentralized infrastructures so let's look at some of the primitives like what are new in web 3 video that's interesting and unique the first thing i want to touch on is nfts specifically video based nfts right today um the the the kind of the content format of nfts are overall um kind of image based but as as we see the the evolution of the internet you know we started with text went to image quickly went to video and now video is the dominant uh form factor of the internet it's going to happen again in nfts some of the interesting things about nfts is that it introduces digital ownership of video to the creators right so now instead of uploading your video into a third-party platform which is owned by that platform the creators now own that content doesn't matter where they upload it it gets stored in decentralized storage and their key their key is the owner of that of that piece of content and that's written on the blockchain and no one can change that so that enables all kind of secondary effects for example trading e-commerce being able to track royalties uh that are perpetual uh across the the life cycle of the of the asset itself um it also creates this interesting dynamic where essentially the database becomes open right currently we um youtube twitch all these platforms put on our arbitrary barriers to compete with incomers for example twitch has an exclusive clause that says if you want to make money on twitch you need to exclusively stream your content on twitch you cannot stream on any other website these types of these types of dynamics are very hostile to users and to viewers of those platforms and in web 3 that completely gets gets flipped around right the content is open by default and all kinds of applications can be built on the same content for different experiences and different use cases and that's a huge interesting design space that people are exploring today second piece i want to touch on is combining smart contracts with video streaming right essentially allowing smart contracts to have logic that control the video streaming experience we're starting to see decentralized video applications to come up some of the early signs are we're starting to see token gated video libraries or token gated live streams right so these are basically um video video assets that give give viewers access based on their token ownership i can buy it in ft and by owning that nft i get access to a video library these are these can be really powerful tools that applications use application developers can use another interesting thing that we're seeing is decentralized video production right so right now for example netflix um controls the power because they control the budget they're they're investing 13 million 13 billion dollars last year into the content creation and that and and not uh not a lot of other uh groups have that budget but if you look at how the content is actually created we know that hollywood is uh just a giant community of freelancers no one has no one is working full time for for netflix in creating these shows these are creators that are independents they're pit they're creating this content and then they're pitching to netflix well just just the same way they can now pitch to decentralized autonomous organizations and to these web three native communities and have a different way to have liquidity and and and combining combining this with d5 you have a new incentive structure for content creation and we we're starting to see this happen decentralized production houses and finally we have the metaverse which is also another important building block and primitive in the web 3 in the western narrative today right it it represents our increased virtual lives that we all live in uh our experiences are moving more and more onto into the virtual world and sometimes it's actual um metaverse that where you have avatars that what you walk within sometimes they're they're more conceptual they're you know games they're they're different fragmented experiences right but video streaming provides an important element to create a richer more dynamic content type for all the participants in these metaverses we'll get into some examples later getting into the opportunities a little more right creator for the creator economy we have nft commerce that's the dominant use case today we're starting to see video based nft platforms to come up we're starting to see nfts starting to become video based and those are very uh very interesting um we're starting to see creator communities and tools for creators to be built around video especially the fact that a lot of these creators are actually video creators uh instead of go for example instead of going to youtube and uploading their video into youtube and have youtube on your content and your audience um creators are starting to use web3 tools where they can they can utilize that launch their own token launch their own nfts and build their own community and take their fans with them to a different platform if their platform is not serving them we're starting to see web 3 powered fandom right this is you know on another level where celebrities and sports teams are starting to get into web 3. um interesting thing well just like smaller creators don't really like decentralized platforms franchises sports franchises celebrities also don't like these platforms because they think it's unfair right it doesn't matter if you are you know shaq you're shocked you're still um you know playing for the mba your your your content is still being uh being controlled in this platforms right so we're starting to see for example shaq recently did an nft sale and he donated all the nft proceeds to the to the foundation that he's that now now fabric foundation he started we're starting to see video based um you know video based and ft's being really popular like in the nba top shots clinton tarantino recently did an nft drop for um for unreleased scenes in pulp fiction um going down um the to another category um decentralized social platforms are starting to emerge right some of these social platforms are um video by nature right so these are think of them as decentralized twitches or decentralized uh youtubes uh but with uh with the ability for the creators to own their actual content some of them are primarily text-based but in the transition of into going to video so this cover is a good example of a decentralized reddit but adding video streaming into into that platform and as we know uh as social platforms evolve over time the dominant um the dominant content format on those social platforms are almost always video video content because those are just long engagement cycles and and high engagement rates right when we what we're seeing in metaverse we're seeing people um people doing all kinds of really interesting things we're seeing um celebrities today that are virtual characters right that are um you know not real people um and and they're kind of produced and they have virtual concerts in the real world where these virtual celebrities are are performing um we're seeing uh real world celebrities streaming their concert into the metaverse right so in the middle we see steve aoki doing uh doing a show in the metaverse uh we're seeing um we're seeing lores and video content being created around metaverse um nfts so so we're so for example the stoner cats animation series um and then all kinds of other use cases you know we see weddings in the metaverse that are also being streamed right um i'm going to uh give a quick demo of the live pier developer toolkit uh to show you uh all what what can be built today with uh with these uh developer uh platforms we actually have created a new product a new api just for the hackers for this weekend so i just press play so what we're seeing here is a video nft creation toolkit it takes two steps to create a video nft the first thing is i go to the live peer hosted gateway i copy my api key the second thing is i'm going to pick a video that i want to create at nit for this is my dog playing the snow having a good time and so after that i'll simply um cr we will create a script to make it as easy as possible it'll it'll do a few things it'll upload your video content into the livestream network it'll use the network to transcode the video to make it optimized for video streaming and delivery in all kinds of different um content formats um or devices optimized for video streaming on the internet and finally it's going to export that video to a decentralized storage so we'll see here is um the you are the kind of the ipfs gateway for all the metadata that's packaged well and ready to be sent to the blockchain to mint the nft so i just copy that url and then i'm into nft and here we issue a transaction into the ethereum blockchain and after the block is confirmed we will have a video nft so really two steps and and now we have that transaction hashback we can go to the openc testnet version and see the video nft right there that's the cover art and all of these things can be customized yeah and so so we'll uh if you have more questions uh you can come to our booth or come talk to our at our discord we also have a live streaming toolkit uh this has been around for a while uh you can build a live streaming application within 15 minutes we recently open sourced a a really powerful media server that we've been building for a long time this media server allows anybody to build a really scalable video streaming infrastructure and service that can serve other applications and you can you can build that with a really low cost because this tool is kind of integrated into the live peer network so you get to run very thin clients of open source software but also get to tap into this decentralized network that already exists today um we have another tool that allows you to stream video directly from the browser so if if your users don't want to download a broadcasting client this is a really useful tool and finally we'll have many demo apps so developers can kind of start from they'll need to start from scratch they can you know clone clone the application and go from there for the hackathon this week we have a bunch of prizes that total up to fifteen thousand dollars um i highly recommend checking them out um yeah come and come and find us and and tell us about your hack ideas and finally we're hiring if you're interested in working on web3 video with us we're hiring across engineering marketing dev rails go check out livehair.com jobs thank you