Blockchain-Based Video Streaming

Innovative innovations in the field of video streaming are expanding across various verticals in order to meet viewers increasing demand for more engaging video experiences. Although live streaming on CDNs has enhanced the viewing experience, OTT platforms have provided the ability to access a wider variety of content. 

  1. Additionally, social video networks have created an opportunity for creators of content and influencers to earn money from their work. 
  2. It's not surprising that video streaming takes up 80 percent of the Internet bandwidth currently. 
  3. While everything appears good at first glance, we'll take an in-depth look at the inside.
  4. The process of streaming a video is extremely costly, and social video companies can be faced with huge streaming fees. 
  5. The cost of streaming videos is mostly due to the process of transcoding which reformats video in order to make it compatible with a range of bandwidths and gadgets. 
  6. If we consider money, transcoding can cost approximately $3 per stream to a cloud provider like Amazon and as high as $4500 per month to a media server.

Because of these huge infrastructure costs due to these high costs, either social media businesses or broadcasters have to close their doors completely or impose a huge tax on their viewers, or bombard them with advertisements.

The evolution of blockchain-based video streaming

It has gained huge popularity due to its distinctive characteristics that offer a more immersive experience in visual media. The public is shifting their style of entertainment away from text and images to video animations.

As a result of this paradigm change, the video streaming industry is now an important source of internet traffic which is contributing to significant portions of the internet-based business. Due to the massive growth in streaming videos, the demand for storage and bandwidth for networks is also massive. Storage data transmission, streaming, and storage were all handled through central cloud servers until the present.

Concerning the central cloud servers, Content creators don't have total control over their information and must adapt to the rules set by central cloud servers.

Therefore, there is an increasing demand and interest in dismantling centralized video streaming and bringing decentralization to the area of transmission of content and streaming video.

Centralized vs decentralized video streaming

Centralized video streaming employs an approach that is client-server that is where the client is directly receiving the video from its server, with a certain amount of delay, which impacts the entire process, including the time of high speed. The client-server technique impacts the bandwidth of the server and may cause bottlenecks to the overall operation of the system since there is a huge number of requests from clients.

Today, most video streaming platforms are built on the model of the client-server for the content delivery networks, which has a few major disadvantages. Here are a few of the most significant disadvantages of the client-server model

Flash crowd

Many streaming servers can't provide more than 100 streaming sessions at a time.

Cost of Bandwidth

Bandwidth costs are a significant issue for content providers since there is no distribution of content and the burden is placed on the main content provider. This means that the cost is higher than P2P networks. While in P2P networks, the cost is shared among everyone who participates in the platform for streaming video decentralized.

One cause of failure

There is only one server centrally located, the model of client-server is susceptible to having a single source of failure. This does not happen for P2P networks.

While in uncentralized P2P video streaming algorithms are channelized for multicasting media content across the various clients. Clients are also able to participate equally in spreading the media content to other clients, taking the burden from servers. In the event of equal client participation and distribution of media content, a decentralized platform for streaming video is able to scale with minimal difficulty.

How can decentralized video streaming services be beneficial?

  • Blockchain technology operates as a peer-to-peer system that eliminates any central authority. P2P network features are not focused on a single server but instead function by disseminating video content.
  • Video curators benefit from the decentralization mechanism of blockchain since they directly publish and provide videos to their users without an intermediary as well as a central database server.
  • The quality of video streaming is higher when performed on an uncentralized platform since it utilizes a P2P-based structure.
  • When using use of a P2P structure, the likelihood that a stream will be split and scattered is greater. This is because the rate of replication for video streaming is higher with P2P than the traditional client-server CDN structure.
  • Both the creators and the audience are able to the network, without any intermediary controller. Content curators are the sole broadcasters of their content via the network. 
  • This content, after receiving an affirmation and a consensus from other nodes, is viewed by the viewers.

What is the decentralized method of streaming video? function?

Decentralized video streaming is based on a distributed system. To use a blockchain-based streaming platform you must connect to nodes on a network that is specifically dedicated to the stream protocol. Nodes are the machines that store the blockchain's block data and serve as the infrastructure for the peer-to-peer network.

In the community of the platform, the video streams that require to be transcoded are sent out by those nodes that broadcast. Following this, the orchestrator nodes will be able to receive streams of video. The orchestrators operate using their processors or GPUs. They transcode and distribute video by using the bandwidth of the server. As a reward for their services, the orchestrator nodes demand a number of gas fees to broadcasters.

What are the benefits of streaming video using blockchain technology?

The different ways blockchain technology supports and transforms online video streaming can be described as the following:

Blockchain-based CDN

Optimizing storage space is extremely crucial in relation to the massive amounts of content being that are uploaded to websites every day. So, a blockchain-based delivery network is vital since it assists in utilizing the optimal storage space available to users from all over the world.

Through a blockchain-based management system, the content creators are able to use the entire space available through the conversion of space to P2P cloud storage as well as a data distribution.

Accessibility and ownership

One of the main problems with streaming media online and in those in the OTT market is the protection of access and ownership of creators' content. For instance, in a centralized online video streaming platform in which one of the users pays for using the platform the videos are not accessible to other users. The transparency isn't as good as when you purchase the DVC or CD, in which you have the cassette.

Smart contracts

To prevent third-party interference in the earning of revenue Blockchain smart contracts aid by establishing direct communication and an uninvolved relationship between the creator and user. This eliminates the cost of intermediaries and is able to automatically check for the security of licenses.

Micro-payments and fast transactions

Blockchain allows consumers and creators of content to use micropayments on the internet without costs for transactions or service fees. Users can use the cryptocurrency wallet to make money from their spending each month by using the blockchain-enabled browser. The browser can then get license information from the blockchain's public database and then examine the media uploaded with the help of IDs for content.

In the end, it relies on on-chain payment to make it easier for transactions that take place between the consumer and owner of the content.

Effective content licensing and monetization

Creators of virtual content are aware of the ramifications of intellectual property laws in addition to the ease of their work being able to be copied or stolen. They are entitled to claim ownership compensation in the event that the intellectual properties they created are utilized for commercial purposes.

What are the different components of blockchain-based streaming of videos?

Broadcaster

An OTT service supplier or user who wants to distribute the video on a network to an audience is referred to as the broadcaster. The broadcaster encodes the video by encrypting it and packaging it. The various organizations on the network serve as nodes to verify these functions in exchange for crypto-based payments.

Blockchain-based CDN

CDN is a term used to describe a content delivery network, which could be a central CDN solution or an uncentralized CDN solution based on the needs of the Blockchain-enabled video streaming system.

Relay nodes

The broadcaster is able to make the choice of the relay's distributed network of nodes to channelize and disperse the video stream. The relay nodes help reduce the latency of the network and provide an extremely high capacity.

Consensus algorithms

There are a variety of consensus protocols such as PoW or Proof-of-Work and PoS or Proof-of-Stake which are used by cryptocurrency-based streaming of video platforms.

Smart contracts

In a blockchain-based system for streaming video, both broadcasters and users work by using smart contracts. For instance, the money made by the end-user the broadcaster can be channelized with the aid of smart contracts. This contains pre-defined terms that must be adhered to.

Communication sub-module

The communication sub-module is responsible for the protocols for connection on video-streaming platforms that allow storage communications that are decentralized between the different nodes.

Events sub-module

The sub-module for events looks for various types of communications, including interaction with users, video transmission, and display during the streaming process.

Wrapping up

Blockchain technology distributed across the globe is revolutionizing video streaming, changing the way users create, share and watch videos. To avoid centralized video streaming servers, many new services for streaming video are adopting blockchain application development to build peer-to-peer video distribution systems and payment systems based on cryptocurrency.

Click here for more information: https://www.leewayhertz.com/blockchain-based-video-streaming/

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