Seed: Connecting Livepeer with EthereumPhone

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Introduction

This seed of an idea is about connecting Ethereum Phone with Livepeer, for mutual benefit to all parties.

Context

EthereumPhone (www, github, discord, twitter) is a part of a project to make the world’s first Ethereum mobile operating system. It is based largely on LineageOS (www, github, twitter), which is successor to CyanogenMod (wikipedia, archive.org)

In images below, the Ethereum Phone appears to be connected to remote peers on Ethereum mainnet.

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Photo: markkat#4524 on Discord.
Device: Google Pixel 3 XL

Livepeer (www, github, discord, twitter) is a project to build a decentralised livestreaming platform.

The project is incentivised via a delegated-Proof-of-Stake (dPoS) mechanism, running as a set of contracts on Ethereum.

Livepeer Public Network consists of an active set of Orchestrators, which manage the work performed by Transcoders on the network. The grafana dashboard of one Orchestrator looks like this:

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The grafana dashboard of one Transcoder looks like this:

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The Seed

EthereumPhone will be in control of the device’s camera and microphone… telling them when to turn on, and turn off.

  • Start capturing video,

    • Stop capturing video.

  • Start capturing audio,

    • Stop capturing audio.

Question: How can these functions integrate natively and elegantly with a Livepeer Orchestrator, as a way to offload energy-intensive video processing.

This offload from the “resource-constrained” mobile device, onto the powerful servers, can be used to drastically enhance a user’s live experience, especially as mobile network speeds increase.

Proposed Minimum Viable Integration

A basic integration can even be done as an automatic onchain integration. An on-device “livepeer” process can query the device’s own RPC endpoint, which can return the following from the chainstate:

  • the Ethereum address of each Orchestrator in Livepeer Public Network

  • the serviceURI (http://ip-address:port) of each Orchestrator

A next step could be to request each Orchestrator to provide a summary of their service offerings.

Nirvana End-State

A nirvana end-state may be where a device can offload all of its “live and in real-time” audio/video processing workload to Livepeer Public Network.

For example, when a user starts capturing video and/or audio, the OS can initiate connections with Livepeer’s Orchestrators.

A user can then choose to start consuming any available services, at the published rates.

Services may include things like:

  • transcoding, (currently public alpha on mainnet),
  • object recognition, (currently in closed alpha on mainnet),
  • detection of copyrighted audio (currently in closed alpha on mainnet), and
  • other live / real-time “AI on the edge” services provided by GPUs.

An Ethereum address managed on the device can handle payment for services rendered, as well as allowing a user to delegate to an Orchestrator, in order to earn a share of their fees and rewards, as some kind of “video UBI”.

Conclusion

Cultivating such connections at the operating-system level, between:

  1. cameras & microphones inside mobile devices,

and

  1. farms of live Orchestrators, on Livepeer Public Network,

can prove to be a powerful basis for mobile innovation, powered by open and public video networks.

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