Speedify LIVE: LivePeer, Blockchain & The Future of Livestreaming

Livepeer is a decentralized video streaming network built on the Ethereum blockchain. In layman's terms, this means that anyone who has extra computing power can put that to use on to the Livepeer network and earn money if they're powering video encoding and video distribution.

Doug Petkanics, CEO of Livepeer, shares in this episode of Speedify Live more about the Livepeer community, how to best earn and use LPT rewards, some great resources on crypto and decentralized streaming, and the future of live streaming.

Here are out 5 takeaways from our talk:

1. LivePeer is a decentralized video streaming network built on the Ethereum blockchain. In layman's terms, this means that anyone who has extra computing power can put that to use on to the LivePeer network and earn money if they're powering video encoding and video distribution 
2. Doug says that Livepeer.org you can think of as an open source project and community with thousands of people who can build things directly, while Livepeer.com you can think of as the first product built on this network – it’s a developer facing streaming API that makes it easy to use the LivePeer network. 
3. When you’re streaming through LivePeer, you’re still using RTMP or SRT, or your protocol of choice, so you don’t have to think of it as “blockchain streaming”, just think of the blockchain as the thing that gets all the computing power needed to encode your video streams. 
4. Doug provides some good advice for possible streamers: make sure you set things like bitrate and segment length appropriately in your streaming software. These are often two things that get missed, and can cause issues, so make sure to run a couple tests to see what the best setting for you is.
5. Doug’s Streamergency story doesn’t really have to do with connection issues, but it is an interesting one: they were having a monthly open community call and suddenly an anonymous participant started sharing their screen, with some unseemly images, so Doug panicked and closed his laptop. They continued the call later with a new link. The lesson learned: make sure you moderate participants on open calls.