This question was asked on a blog post, so I wanted to paste my response here so others can chime in with opinions and other relevant projects to take inspiration from…
BitTorrent live is a great analog to Livepeer from a technology perspective. Livepeer has a lot of catching up to do on all the great work they’ve done. But unless I’m mistaken it’s a closed protocol, proprietary, and ad/subscription supported at the product/business level. We think an open protocol that anyone can build on top of, catalyzed by the token model and accompanying incentives, is likely to see more developer attention and a bigger ecosystem. Other technologies that also were inspirational were Bittorrent, Webtorrent, Peer5, Streamroot, Streamium.