Hey everyone. I just can’t get over the idea that instead of waiting for several small web3 dapps to, you know, make an impact and even trying to jumpstart them by giving out funds, why won’t Livepeer also focus on Web2? Am I missing something? I must be missing something because this is just so obvious to me and I don’t see it ever come up.
Transcoding costs with Livepeer are a fraction of centralized solutions. It seems to me that it’s just a matter of a little push for (some) web2 companies to adopt Livepeer and other similarly decentralized infrastructure blockchain solutions. Web3 will happen, yes, but Livepeer doesn’t need to wait for web3’s mainstream adoption. It has a huge prospective customer that is just waiting there to use Livepeer: It’s the incumbent businesses. Please let me know what I’m missing. Is it about the “mission and vision” stuff? You know, is it something like “that is not the vision this project was founded for” kinda thing? I don’t know. I can’t think of anything else.
Thanks.
What I’m saying is instead of or rather along with giving out funds to potenial web3 dapp owners, some budget could be used for “sales and marketing” to web2. Is that so bad?
What web2 needs is they need to first know about livepeer, and then they’d need techincal guarantees to set up the system and consult with in case of a problem. That’s it. That’s more than enough to boost demand.
Look, whenever there is an introductory presentation for Livepeer, Doug and Eric always start the speech by how much video is consumed every day on the internet or how video is the main thing that uses up such and such percentage of the entire bandwidth of the world. And yet, Livepeer is not putting itself out there to serve for that need. The numbers in those introductions belong to video of Web2, not Web3. We don’t need to give out funds to web3 dapps. If they can emerge on their own, they are more than welcome to use Livepeer’s services. But the demand is on web2 and why are we still not all over it? Any funds should be used for that goal, imo.
Yes I agree, there is a lot of potential for Livepeer ecosystem to target web2 apps. I think a web2 style marketing company would definitely qualify for treasury funds. Maybe you’d be interested in setting up a marketing/development team for targeting web2 companies and onboard users?
Once delta goes live you could apply for the funds to get that project going.
The Livepeer core team (Livepeer Inc) intends to appeal to all video developers whether they’re building applications onchain or offchain, web2 or web3. And we’ve made updates to the livepeer.org homepage to reflect this - you’ll notice the homepage touts Livepeer’s value propositions that come with being an open and decentralized protocol, but it doesn’t actually mention the word “web3” anywhere.
It’s true that Livepeer is uniquely suited to serve applications built on open, onchain, and decentralized protocols because Livepeer itself is an open, onchain, and decentralized protocol, but all applications benefit from the scalability, reliability, affordability, and superior developer experience that comes with being an open, onchain, and decentralized protocol. You can expect more updates to the website and the project’s messaging across channels managed by Livepeer Inc to reflect this in the coming months.
Just came across this link.
Decentralization will not come as a standalone revolution. It will integrate and merge with existing business and industries.
AFAIK Livepeer Inc has been open to servicing Web2 customers (IE Picarto, currently the biggest user of the network) and by going to conferences like NAB or IBC to pitch to traditional audiences, but most efforts have been targeted to web3 audiences, as evidenced by their efforts on hackatons, verifiable video, video NFT’s, etc. If I recall correctly they did use to have a bigger focus on trying to capture some of the web2 market in the past but were unsuccessful
It’s tough to target both markets as they require a whole different strategy, marketing campaign or specific features. Some challenges that come to mind:
- Web2 companies seem to be way more risk averse and the Livepeer ecosystem is still experimental
- Lots of business don’t like the idea of having public entities handling their sensitive media data. Any B/O/T can potentially modify or leak it
- Established businesses already have a tightly integrated stack or can be vendor locked, making it difficult to convince them to switch over even if cheaper
- There is still a general distrust to anything related to crypto
- In the past there was no (functioning) VOD pipeline
- In the past the live pipeline and recordings were much more unreliable
- In the past the added delay from broadcaster to viewer was way higher
- The larger the scale of the business, the more demanding SLA’s they ask for, requiring complex monitoring and redundancy solutions
So with all of the progress made in the past 1-2 years maybe some new doors have opened. Personally I can’t fault a web3 company to focus on the web3 market, which can only increase in potential as it matures over time (and Livepeer Inc is establishing themselves nicely in this space).
I think an even better solution would be that a new Broadcaster (maybe a DAO of engaged O’s and D’s?) pop up which focusses on providing a full enterprise-targeted service (and would likely contribute to improving the capabilities of go-livepeer as well)
That explains a lot, thank you.
Just one related idea: Livepeer could still target relatively small scale web2 startups. The startups maybe can’t afford AWS or maybe don’t want to because they have limited runway to start with. They would be less risk-averse, maybe more tolerant with data content privacy and more open to a blockchain solution.
As for web2 indicatives, there have been some efforts on the grants committee for building tools to integrate web2. Such as the Bubble integration that is just getting completed [Video Disruptors Grant]: Developing a Livepeer no-code plugin · Issue #138 · livepeer/Grant-Program · GitHub
Also the release of the Livepeer Wordpress plugin and the recent Livepeer OBS plugin are testaments to the effort as well. But I see a lot more opportunity for things like the Livepeer Innovators DAO to fund teams that build seamless web2 plugins for small builders in the future without the knowledge of any crypto rails on the backend too.
Just need more Livepeer tools available overall and a robust Livepeer network to keep customers happy.