Livepeer 🛠 NFT Hacks using Video - Eric Tang

[Applause] [Music] good morning good afternoon good evening depending on where you're calling from we have eric here from live here doing his workshop on nft hacks using video um questions go into the zoom chat um and otherwise i'll pass the mic off to eric thanks santa thanks for having me uh hi everybody my name is eric tang and i'm the co-founder and cto at life here life here is building the world's open video infrastructure especially infrastructure for web 3. um we will be working on this project for the last five years and today i want to tell you a little bit about nft hacks using video um given that uh we're we're gonna have an ft themed hackathon today um before we really dive into the hacks themselves and the the technical details um i'd love to just share a little bit about like why um i think video is nft uh video is interesting uh for for nfts um well we know that you know as users of you know the internet right video is really everywhere it's for it's in our entertainment system is here to help us uh with education uh it's here for e-commerce uh help us make purchasing decisions um it's here to help us communicate uh as as people and and as businesses right in fact video is 80 of all the internet's traffic right and this has been growing um it's only been a growing trend in the last um 10 ish years and it'll continue to grow especially as we we get into this new like post-covet world um so so video is important for web3 and important for nfts to to be tackling and have really great solutions the other thing that's interesting about video is it's driven by creators right videos are created by people uh and and and and there's uh there's interesting economics uh because of this for example these large video platforms that we all know of uh spend a lot of money each year trying to cord creators to come on to their platforms to create video and that's an interesting phenomenon because if you think about it you know these platforms don't actually create any videos themselves right they rely on creators to actually make content for for these um you know for for their product even for the for the big platforms and netflix and disney um if you really look into it uh they're not they're not necessarily you know producing they're not necessarily creating their content uh as much as uh getting creators to come and do a contract with them or buying the content from creators after they have already been been created and produced the the other thing to note of today's world of video online is that it's highly centralized right there are you know about 50 million people around the world that call themselves creators there's about you know a small amount a small portion that are who are created who are professionals and you know a large number of them are amateurs but if you look at the number of platforms that people creators use to create their content and make a living it's actually a very very small amount right it's all concentrated on youtube and um and instagram and and tech talk and whatnot and because all of these platforms use the same business model um to monetize the content basically by selling um aggregating the data and selling this data uh to advertisers uh they're they're starting to emerge um to be this um surveillance surveillance capitalism right and if you're interested i highly recommend reading this book uh it's really about what the world has turned into um from where um kind of before these big platforms existed where today um you know because these platforms became so powerful and became so centralized uh you know there was only a few mechanisms online that are capitalizing most of the economics um and and you know tying this back to nfts and especially to to an interesting article that the zora mizora team has written there's this it's this concept of crypto media right and it's really this idea of now we have web3 we can actually create media that are independent in itself but also tied to a market uh so that they it becomes a single unit right so to look into this a little bit more a crypto media is as an object is a combination of two things one is the media itself and the second is the market for that medium for that piece of media right not all content under the sun should have a market um but a lot of them do have a market all right we do have the potential to to have a market created around them uh so for the media we have the creator of the media and the owner of the media who that can be different right and then we have the market that's attached to that so some of the um interesting characteristics of the crypto media right um this is by the way written in a really nice piece of writing if you uh if you go to cryptomedia.wtf uh you you can you can read more about this um you know the team the team the zoroax team highlighted these crypto media files should be token based they should be permissionless they should be universally accessible they should be valuable they should be internet native they should be platformless and they should be composable right so these are all like interesting and new characteristics that media did not have before right like each one of them all right so so it's interesting to to talk about what this means uh especially in this web 3 context right token based um you know we can think of them as you know a piece of media is represented by an nft on chain for example now permission list means anyone can create this media uh and no one can no one can stop uh no one can stop you from doing that um it's universally accessible uh it doesn't necessarily have to be public by default right we can have private kind of we can have access control on this media but it needs to be universally accessible which means and it can be accessible from anywhere around the world anybody who has internet access has the potential to access this this content right so when it comes to video streaming um what this means is we'll need a centralized infrastructure that actually serves this content so that it can be universally accessible and it's not just sitting on someone's server and that that you know he can decide who has access to this you know this piece of media um it can be valuable right we talked about it attaching the market to this media makes it tradable and therefore gives it value um it's internet native yeah so so this means it can be kind of transferred on the internet by itself it doesn't need to again like sending someone's server right it's platform-less it means this media can be accessed through many different applications not just a single single application like a youtube or or a tech talk right and composable which is pretty interesting right it means media can be put together uh to create other forms of forms of content for example we are we are actually already see this in the traditional world where you know musicians will come together and and use each other's samples to create new pieces of music even for video you can see different visual effects being taken being meshed together to create new new types of content right so in order for all these characteristics to be true for video we need we need certain new uh we need new types of technology to to enable this right so so let's look at um you know what are what are some of the building blocks that exist today in the web 3 world that help us to help us create this types of new media what one is what video has to still stream well right um so um video transcoding is one of the one of those you know mechanisms that that's really necessary for uh online video to be streamable uh to all kinds of devices uh across uh across the internet under any kind of network condition right so so what this means is uh for a single piece of video you know whether it's a live stream or a video file uh it gets um it gets uploaded and then processed uh into different bit rates and uh and sizes of the video right so for example a a high resolution 1080p um video might be sent to a laptop or a gaming console where a you know 240p video that's small might be sent to a mobile phone or a tablet right so even though you know between those two devices we think we're watching the same video they're actually being transferred and processed into a different into different bit rates and versions right um and and on top of this we have video playback mechanisms called hls and hls basically means we can stitch together all these different all these different bit rates and allow this type of playback where you know one you know the viewer can kind of jump from one version to another without a breaking experience as they're watching the video so so for example sometimes if you're sitting at home and watching what you're gonna show on your computer uh and you know the video starts starts out very grainy and then uh and then over time it becomes more crisp right this is adaptive bitrate streaming in play where when you're starting to play the video in order to have a very quick playback uh experience a small version is sent to you and then over time the player recognizes that you have access bandwidth and therefore switches to a higher resolution video without having to disrupt your your viewing experience right um and and this is already enabled and accessible just via the traditional video streaming tech stack right you can use many different video players to do this uh some are proprietary some open source uh okay lifeviewer actually has a has a embedded player now you can just simply add an iframe into your into our application and and you know this piece of code is is in the live peer life here documentation you can find that but beyond that um in order to have all of these different um characteristics of um a crypto media right we need to have things like infrastructure portability so what does that mean it means um if a video is being hosted uh and served by a single piece of uh by some infrastructure the application developer needs to know and have the um uh have to guarantee that if that if that infrastructure goes away for whatever reason they will be able to easily switch to another infrastructure and continue this and continue to serve that content without any interruption right this is a this is not dissimilar too if you think about um you know you're using uh if you're building a dap using you know a blockchain like ethereum right you can access ethereum via fiora but you can also access by running your own guest node right or or using alchemy right so you have portability for uh for the data that you're getting so the same thing should be should be available for video right so as you're using live peer studio to to serve your video um and then you if you wanted to switch to your own life here node uh you can do that and and continue to have a similar experience um and from here um we can introduce the concept of ownership and providence right um so prior to to web 3 video is uploaded into some platform and then it starts to live in someone else's platform right um the creator starts stops really owning the video um in in this web 3 world um well an application can use um can you use a video streaming network like live pier to serve the video they can use a decentralized storage solution like ipfez or r weave to actually to store the video and still own that content because they own the key and at the same time they come into nft on a blockchain like ethereum or polygon and and signal to the world that they actually own that piece of content and all of this like because all of these infrastructure pieces are decentralized and not owned by a single entity um the ownership and providence truly lies with the user and then the creator right and from here the creators all of a sudden um can get get around the problem of kind of being handheld being um hand tied by the uh by the platform uh in terms of how they can connect with their audience because they own the content and they own the providence of the of the creation they can start to directly connect with the con with the with their audience and use different tools uh to connect with them um one interesting new tool they have now is token economics or crypto economics right so uh creators can use nft mints or direct tipping or creating virtual goods or creating their own creator token using token gating right all kinds of new mechanisms start to exist to help them create a new economic opportunity for themselves create a more authentic relationship with their audience uh and and be able to be able to truly own their uh the content that they create um through this um especially for video um live here is working on a new concept called verifiable video with this idea that um the wallet address is actually really um associated with the the video content itself so that when you're getting a piece of video data um the data stream itself actually contains verifiable information of the creator of the video and also the lit validity of the video video itself so that when you're you're getting that piece of that video that you're watching it you know that it's coming from the actual creator it doesn't matter which application you're viewing it from um and coupled with this is this concept of an immutable video link right um so you know you can see this life here called slash slash um video link right that represents this video it could be a um it could be a p on demand video file uh the streamable or it could be a live stream uh that that is currently going on live um that that immutable video link can be used in multiple applications and different users of the different applications can know that you know they're all watching the same video and in you know the video link can be taken into other applications as new applications are being built um i want to switch here a little bit and talking about start to talk about today's uh hackathon right i understand hackathon is almost over um but for for people who are building out there uh lifepure is offering a five thousand dollar bounty um and um in the the easiest way to to build with life here uh today is using lifebear studio uh which is a new product that we that we launched last month um and and and this product offers live streaming on demand video streaming and video minting now you can you can almost think about this um you know hosted service as a gateway to the live peer network so they can easily start using a set of apis and start building your decentralized application um a couple of you know simple things that you can do with it you can upload a video file into live hair studio live studio would handle all the ingest and transcoding storage of the file and caching of the file so that you can easily play back the video and and be guaranteed a good streaming experience globally it doesn't matter where your viewers are on top of that you can export that those video files into ipf sr weave using that as a um you know as the url for you to mint an nft right and and there's already a there's a there's an example that i can show you quickly to just illustrate this uh [Music] let me increase this a little bit um so what i have here is let me just show you quickly how to get your list of video video assets right here i'm just querying the the live peer studio api and here what you will see is a list of all the assets that i have uploaded into live peer studio right you can see here for example i have a i have a playback url for this video that i recently uploaded i can copy this and [Music] play it back i'll take a little bit i will start downloading the video and start playing back this video is coming back on the other screen here it's a waterfall okay now what we can do is we can we can mint a video nft using this api there's a handy tool here that allows us to do this really quickly it's the same waterfall video that i'm using so what i can do here is uh i'm going to copy in my api key that i created for this demo um i can call this sora waterfall uh i don't i don't need to um customize any uh nft metadata but if i wanted to i could so now the you know this this little program is uploading the file and it's going to get the file uploaded and organized and organize all the metadata together to to a nice ipfs hash so i can use that to just mint the nft we'll come back a little bit later to see the see the minting process so let me continue to to push on with the with the demo um the other thing that we can do is to create a live stream in life here right um and and let me let me show you how to do that quickly [Music] so the first thing that i will do is to go to life here studio um go to the dashboard and i can already see a list of video streams that that i've created before notice all of these streams are idle i'm going to create a new stream with the api by using just the curl command that i prepared from before okay so now we have this video stream created uh notice it was called zora demo stream we go here we see there's a zorro demo stream in this stream we have some information that we have all the information that we need in order to in order to actually do the stream so if we click into this we'll see that there's a stream key and this is what's needed in order to authenticate the video ingest so here i have a um you know broadcasting software called obs um i am just going to copy that uh stream key in here i press ok and i start streaming and notice that it takes a little bit to connect to the to the end server uh but now we we have started doing the live stream so let's go back to the let's go back to this live peer studio uh we should see it it takes a little bit to get to get the video loaded uh usually less than 30 seconds and after that uh we should be able to see the live stream as we see this right here um the playback url is is um yeah it's in here uh and and they should all of the information should be in the uh in the url uh in the in the response api response oh well actually so interesting uh timeout here um i'm not going to to debug this i'm just gonna move on to to the next thing uh okay so with with live streams um you can start to think about uh some interesting mechanisms like uh token gating um there there's actually there's a token gating beta feature that's available it's not documented right now on the live peer studio page but if you're interested in using this feature ping us in discord and we can send you the documentation some hack ideas um one um we've been thinking about this um especially for related to nfts um one one idea is of course um just using video nfts as collectibles right and that's just simply minting the video nfd you can the way you do it is you can upload it into live peer into life here through uh through processes like this one right so um you can upload the video and based on using the um using the playback url you'll be able to get the um you'll be able to get the the way to play back the video and from there you'll be able to create a nft using using ipfs here these are the these are the responses that you will need another thing that's um that's interesting is to to create a decentralized cameo only fans right um and what this would entail is a smart contract that allows anyone to kind of put up a uh almost like a bounty for others to create a video for them and then as the video gets created and uploaded into you know minted as an nft right that bounty can be fulfilled another idea um is to have an on-chain video broadcasting channel um this can be achieved by creating a live stream as an nft uh and kind of using the like using the broadcast you can store the broadcast link in a in something like a lit protocol right and then depending on whether someone has rights to broadcast into the video into the video nft they'd be able to kind of load the the broadcasting link and to create it here here is an idea of of how to do that so we you know before we've already created this live stream and it's still going um so what we can do is we can use a embedded embedded video player to create the nft right so imagine here is here's a an embedded player that we have created for people if you're interested you can come you can ask us for the link um and going back to this test stream uh we can copy the playback url uh and and paste it in here and here we should be able to play back the video uh it might take a little bit because uh bro i'm broadcasting lots and and receiving lots of video right now so my home connection might not be um might not be working as well but you should be able to embed this link into this is the ipfs link that's already living living ipfs so you can simply just embed this link as the animation uri cool yeah that's um that's all for my presentation today uh so yeah let me let me stop here and uh and see if anybody has any questions all right well i thought we're like like crowd today a little bit yeah it's the weekend um yeah well i guess we can end things here um eric thank you so much for taking the time to do yet another workshop for youth bubble um hackathon metabolism um yeah this video is gonna be up on youtube for reference um for anytime you want some um cool content from live pier or like the hack ideas that you just proposed there um but once again eric thank you for taking the time to do this and thank you to the rest of you for tuning in um and with that being said i hope everyone has a great rest of your weekend all right thanks everybody bye you