Streamplace 2.0: Solving Video for Everybody Forever

[j0sh]

Congratulations on all the progress in the past year and thanks Eli for the transparency and answering everybody’s questions here and on Discord.

My sense is that Streamplace is a large and ambitious project and you clearly have a vision for where things should go. That being said, I do have a few additional concerns:

• The proposal, even the latest split one, could have used a little more time to marinate before being put up for a vote. Folks are still thinking through things and have raised many good points. Eli, for your part, you are doing an excellent job of being responsive to these concerns, but I am not sure what the urgency was in putting the proposal up for vote. That gives me pause.

• Transcoding plays a small (but important!) role in Streamplace. As you’ve clearly explained, there is a lot that goes into a successful startup: the partnerships, marketing and outreach, development of core and adjacent technologies, etc. The Livepeer network benefit is second-order, and still speculative. Is the Livepeer community alone in shouldering the financial risk for these non-ecosystem initiatives? Streamplace seems to be as much (if not more) of an AT Protocol play - are there resources there for you to tap? Committed funding from entities in that sphere would be great validation - it doesn’t have to be of the same magnitude, but it’s a big vote of confidence.

• Given the size of the ask, and that (all?) your funding is from Livepeer, I would like to see more ways to make use of the Livepeer network outside of transcoding. AI moderation would be a good candidate, even if that means development of new pipelines in order to be useful. That would be an excellent way to contribute capabilities back to the ecosystem and bring additional usage onto the network. Are there other areas where Livepeer might be able to plug in with its non-video capabilities, eg LLM or TTS / SST? What about distribution?

[iameli]

Thanks Josh, this is really thoughtful.

@j0sh

The proposal, even the latest split one, could have used a little more time to marinate before being put up for a vote. Folks are still thinking through things and have raised many good points. Eli, for your part, you are doing an excellent job of being responsive to these concerns, but I am not sure what the urgency was in putting the proposal up for vote. That gives me pause.

I get it, I wasn’t aware we were asking folks to let things sit for at least seven days. Mea culpa. That said, I see the next eight weeks as incredibly important; I’ve known the Skylight team for a little while now but nobody predicted it would pop off quite as hard as it did. I feel like I need to make something happen right now or the chance won’t come again. Thus the drop to a less-controversial amount and the immediate posting.

@j0sh

Transcoding plays a small (but important!) role in Streamplace. As you’ve clearly explained, there is a lot that goes into a successful startup: the partnerships, marketing and outreach, development of core and adjacent technologies, etc. The Livepeer network benefit is second-order, and still speculative. Is the Livepeer community alone in shouldering the financial risk for these non-ecosystem initiatives? Streamplace seems to be as much (if not more) of an AT Protocol play - are there resources there for you to tap? Committed funding from entities in that sphere would be great validation - it doesn’t have to be of the same magnitude, but it’s a big vote of confidence.

That’s a really excellent point - you know, it’s funny, my intuition had that entirely backwards. In my head I was like “I’m going to go back to the treasury first, of course, it’ll be respectful of me to offer right of first refusal.” So I didn’t make a big effort around that to this point, but you’re totally right, it’d do a lot to demonstrate the momentum around the project. Let me see if I can’t scare something up before the end of the voting period. Coming from a Web3 background you’d be appalled at the minuscule resources available for public goods funding in the AT Protocol universe, but I bet I can arrange for something.

That having been said — yeah, it’s an AT Protocol play. Bluesky bootstrapped the world’s most successful decentralized social network and the first wave of video applications is just now launching. You’re gonna want some ATProto plays.

@j0sh

Given the size of the ask, and that (all?) your funding is from Livepeer, I would like to see more ways to make use of the Livepeer network outside of transcoding. AI moderation would be a good candidate, even if that means development of new pipelines in order to be useful. That would be an excellent way to contribute capabilities back to the ecosystem and bring additional usage onto the network. Are there other areas where Livepeer might be able to plug in with its non-video capabilities, eg LLM or TTS / SST? What about distribution?

Distribution is the huge one — if go-livepeer renamed its ingest functions to “gateway” so I’m happy to seize the unused word “broadcaster” for Streamplace. It’s been designed from the ground up for simple peer-to-peer replication, moderation, and embedded provenance. If orchestrators want to get into the content distribution game, this is the foundation, absolutely.

Text-to-speech and speech-to-text are a really great fit too - if the models are ready on the server and can be sent back with the MPEG-TS we could get something basic working for this in a day or two. We were talking about it today on stream with @rickstaa actually!

The AI moderation side is a big opportunity if there’s someone that’s able to do the work of getting the right models. That’s the part that seems really hard to me. If we can figure out that part, we’ll absolutely wire it up to the Streamplace moderation infrastructure absolutely. I’m trying to think of the kinds of models that would be a good first line of defense - adult content would probably be reasonably well-defined.

[obodur]

Eli said it himself, he got $360k in the first proposal. There was nothing to show in the beginning and he got 360k. Now there is substance to show, we see a lot of progress has been made and Inc is showing resistance. Why would one say OK to 360k then, when there was nothing to show but resist to the same amount now, when there is good proof of work in front of us?

Look, I know this looks like VC capital again. But I think it’s worth it. Most grants and treasury funds so far on Livepeer AI, as far as I understood them, was put to good use but all demand through them, all demand due to them, they are all incentivized. Livepeer still doesn’t have any real Ai revenue after 1.5 years. Pmf is still being explored. It’s still in trial/error phase, still in experimentation phase, still “let’s give money to folks to use Livepeer GPUs” phase. But with this, at least there are clear alternative paths forward in terms of pmf. At least it is already known how real money can be made thru this. It might not work out but it’s better to give it that chance than not giving it imo because Livepeer needs demand more than anything and this is the best candidate so far as far as I can see.

“Public goods”. Real demand is the best public good for Livepeer right now.. I don’t wanna see just code and no action. Streamplace does the code and seems to have found a real user/customer for it. To me, this is what “public good” is.

[adamsoffer]

Eli, I’m genuinely excited to see all the progress you’ve made with Streamplace. This feels like a major step forward and a real opportunity to help fulfill Livepeer’s mission of becoming the world’s open video infrastructure. I’m fully in support of the proposal.

One thing I did want to raise: while the original Aquareum proposal signaled support for other decentralized social protocols such as Farcaster and Nostr, this version seems focused exclusively on AT Protocol. I totally understand the decision to start with one decentralized social protocol—staying focused is critical, especially when resources are limited. That said, as it stands today, the only way to log into Streamplace is through Bluesky (or a PDS).

The concern is that Bluesky tends to attract an ideologically homogeneous community—largely aligned with a specific set of progressive or left-leaning views. It also applies a level of moderation that many people find heavy-handed. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with platforms serving particular communities or values, relying solely on one with such a distinct identity risks limiting broader adoption and alienating users who don’t see themselves reflected there.

In the spirit of Streamplace’s mission to solve video for everybody, I think it’s important to continue signaling support for other decentralized social networks as well. Farcaster and Nostr both have strong momentum, and even a simple mention that support for them is on the roadmap post-AT Protocol would go a long way in reinforcing that inclusive, protocol-agnostic, credibly neutral vision.

Really appreciate all the amazing work you’re doing. This has been inspiring to watch, and I can’t wait to see where it goes.

For transparency: my name was attached to the original Aquareum proposal, but I’m not involved in this phase of the project.

[Authority_Null]

While it’s great to see the trust and faith being put into Eli with this proposal now passing, I am concerned about the precedent being set. The proposal was rushed to the explorer and the payment streaming contract was never used. I see this was disclosed and the proposal was split in 2, but, if anything, I think it should’ve been structured the other way around.

I have a hard time rationalizing sending a lump sum payment of this size to anyone and I can see how this could cause all future proposals to increase their ask. I also see Eli has stated there is no clear business plan here and that this is all very much an experiment… that’s concerning considering the amount and lack of systems in place to manage VC style treasury funding.

One other thing that jumped out to me was the quote below. It reads to me like there are 2 very different directions for Streamplace and that both will be worked on at the same time. I don’t know if this will be feasible without significantly more funding.

The quote:

We’re not just building a livestreaming platform—we’re establishing the infrastructure and primitives for an entire generation of video applications on decentralized social networks.

I personally strongly dislike Bluesky as a platform based on who it attracts and agree with adam in the above comments, but it does make sense why you’d want to start there, and it doesn’t matter a whole lot if it brings demand

Anywho, just adding my input and don’t want to downplay the great work Eli has done thus far; the proposal is passing and hopefully it brings much demand and technical advancements to the network! Congrats Eli!

[speedybird]

Thanks for the responses. The scaled back total is more palatable to me. A LOI would be great btw, but at this stage in the voting it is irrelevant. I sincerely hope for the best and encourage more attribution back to Livepeer in your marketing, docs, and code. Good luck and let us know how we can help!

[iameli]

Hey Adam, thanks for the support. Had my response bouncing around in my head a bit; wanted to be thoughtful. Here’s the easy part.

One thing I did want to raise: while the original Aquareum proposal signaled support for other decentralized social protocols such as Farcaster and Nostr, this version seems focused exclusively on AT Protocol. I totally understand the decision to start with one decentralized social protocol—staying focused is critical, especially when resources are limited. That said, as it stands today, the only way to log into Streamplace is through Bluesky (or a PDS). […]

In the spirit of Streamplace’s mission to solve video for everybody, I think it’s important to continue signaling support for other decentralized social networks as well. Farcaster and Nostr both have strong momentum, and even a simple mention that support for them is on the roadmap post-AT Protocol would go a long way in reinforcing that inclusive, protocol-agnostic, credibly neutral vision.

100% endorsed; solving video for everybody forever means what it sounds like. The ATProto focus at the moment is partially by operational necessity and partially me being opportunistic and filling a niche. (Also not a coincidence that must of the Bluesky team is based in Seattle!) The plan is absolutely to be the obvious choice for video on all of decentralized social; the Skylight push is just us seizing the opportunity to prove that the technology works and the demand is there.

The concern is that Bluesky tends to attract an ideologically homogeneous community—largely aligned with a specific set of progressive or left-leaning views. It also applies a level of moderation that many people find heavy-handed. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with platforms serving particular communities or values, relying solely on one with such a distinct identity risks limiting broader adoption and alienating users who don’t see themselves reflected there.

This is the part I’m nervous about, because with the Skylight integration I find myself in the position of having to make a lot of high-stakes moderation decisions. As a baseline, we need to not have illegal content and we need to comply with App/Play store regulations — no nudity, probably. Fair enough. But then it gets harder.

What kind of attire is allowed on a stream? How old do you have to be? In terms of the content, what’s allowed? Election denial? Vaccine misinformation? Hate speech? I’m in a position where I have to make some kind of decision either way, and there’s no way to navigate that without being accused of ideological bias in one direction or another. I don’t really think “credibly neutral” position is possible here, and I’m also uncertain it’d be desirable to pursue it. When we decentralize everything, what’s left is humans operating servers. Broadcasters are accountable for what they choose to broadcast.

That’s all on one hand. On the other — we’ve designed everything to be trivially forkable. Don’t agree with our moderation, that’s great! Run your own servers, deploy your own apps, rebroadcast the streams you want and include content that isn’t allowed in our app. The average Mastodon user probably doesn’t agree with the average Truth Social user about much, but they can still operate the same codebase behind the scenes. This is one thing I think Bluesky’s gotten very wrong to their detriment, for the record — it’s way too hard to stand up your own version of the stack. Streamplace is one binary forever.

I’ll stop there — TLDR: the app and first-party servers need stricter moderation than the software and hopefully ease-of-forking means our moderation wouldn’t slow down the underlying technology.

[adamsoffer]

Thanks Eli, excited to hear that the Streamplace vision still includes all of decentralized social!

I hadn’t meant to spark a broader conversation about moderation philosophy. My main point was the risk of tying Streamplace to a single, ideologically narrow social graph. The distinctly progressive, left-leaning identity that’s taken hold on Bluesky can make it feel less welcoming to many developers and users, so I’m happy to hear you’re still committed to opening up to all the socials

That said, I’m fully aligned with you that responsibility for moderation increases as you move up the stack. Doug’s post captures that well:

Live Video, Censorship Resistance, and Responsibility

When I mentioned that Bluesky applies a level of moderation many find heavy-handed, the concern is more about the perception that it suppresses differing viewpoints rather than its stated goal of preventing misinformation. I’m glad to see Bluesky announce plans to adopt X’s open-source Community Notes. It’s a more transparent, community-driven approach to misinformation and a good example of moderation that aspires to credible neutrality. Of course, Community Notes only works well when the social graph includes a meaningful diversity of viewpoints.

To be fair, Bluesky is just one network built on the AT Protocol. The social graph may diversify politically and culturally as more AT Protocol apps emerge. I hope it does. But right now, that diversity isn’t there, and it’s unclear if or when it will be. That’s why it’s important that Streamplace eventually opens up to the emerging set of decentralized social protocols.

Glad to hear you’re moving in that direction and appreciate how thoughtful you are around these decisions. Pumped about where this project is headed!