The Livepeer project reached an important milestone last week as we finished a “soft launch” of the test network. It’s really great to see the whole protocol working end-to-end in a real test environment. We are making progress at a really good pace, and I’m excited for our next milestone - the test network launch.
We have have 3 high-level goals for this milestone:
- A full-featured test network
- Network stability
- Better broadcasting UX
A full-featured test network means 1) easy UX to participate in the protocol, and 2) realistic test environment that mimics real-world scenarios. The work here is around the tools and UX for protocol participants, visibility into protocol status, and help more testers setting up their nodes.
Network stability means minimizing the cases when a user somehow cannot broadcast and view a stream. This is hard to track because we don’t know all the error cases out there, but there are plenty of steps we can take to make it as good as we can. For example - following good engineering workflow to minimize bugs, removing dependencies to other software packages, and setting up test environments that mimics real-world setup. Better coding practice and more tests lead to better stability.
Even though broadcasting UX is not at the core of the protocol, it’s important for the project because it can be a great tool for explaining what we are about. It means a user should be able to send a video into the network and get a viewing link back with minimal knowledge / effort. Our community has been helping a lot on this front, and we will continue to make progress this way.
The use of Github issues was effective for the soft launch, so let’s continue to use that. I have gone through the issues for the “Testnet Launch” milestone and labeled them either “feature/ux”, “stability”, or “broadcasting”. Anyone is welcome to add to the list / make changes.
Feel free to hop into the gitter or contact us directly for questions and feedbacks.