Transcoder Campaign: ftkuhnsman

Transcoders Transcoder Campaign
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Hello everyone!

I am Joey Kuhnsman from Tampa, Florida. I operate and maintain the ftkuhnsman orchestrator set up on the Livepeer Network.

I am a blockchain enthusiast eager to get involved with projects that provide real purpose and utility value to the blockchain community. Livepeer certainly fits that criteria. I decided to participate in Livepeer because I see the value it provides, enabling companies and/or individuals alike to stream live video in a highly accessible and affordable manner. I see it as a disruptive technology that will reshape the future of live video.

Over the last few years I have been accumulating GPUs to mine ethereum, but have decided to find a new purpose for my hardware. I initially setup the ftkuhnsman orchestrator with one GPU as an experiment, largely to get familiar with the technology. I have now employed all of my available GPUs and will continue to expand by reinvesting future rewards.

Full transparency, I am relatively new to Livepeer and still learning. I am open and eager to get your feedback on my current setup / reward and fee structure, especially ways you think it can be enhanced.

Overview of my current setup

Orchestrator
The orchestrator is setup on a Vultr VPS located in Atlanta, Georgia datacenter. The VPS runs the latest version of Livepeer on Ubuntu 20.04 x64. Livepeer has been daemonized and verbosely logged, and I have fully configured Grafana, enabling me to easily monitor system health and get alerted to errors to minimize downtime. I believe transparency is the best policy, so if you decide to stake with ftkuhnsman and would like the ability to see the orchestrator logs and Grafana dashboard in real-time I am happy to grant you read-only access.

Currently have a Geth light node running on the orchestrator VPS.

Transcoders
I currently have configured two separate physical transcoders, each with multiple Nvidia GPUs. Further, on each transcoder I run separate instances of livepeer for each GPU installed. I found that this setup reduces overall transcoder downtime. Further, I have implemented custom scripts to monitor each instance of livepeer and automatically restart an instance if it crashes. (If anybody is interested in implementing a similar setup I am happy to help!)

Transcoder1
1x GTX1060 - 10 stream capacity
1x GTX1070 - 10 stream capacity
1x RTX2070 - 10 stream capacity

Transcoder2
2x GTX980ti - 10 stream capacity each

As noted above, I can currently support 50 concurrent streams. When I originally setup the transcoders I tried a high max session rate, but ran into stability issues. While my equipment and bandwidth is capable of supporting more, I have decided to be conservative and slowly increase capacity over time as stake / demand increases. At this point, stability / uptime are my highest priority.

Both transcoders are currently setup on the same network, located in Tampa Florida. However, I am currently pursuing opportunities to setup additional transcoders in other states on the east coast to achieve some level of geographic diversity. More to follow on this in the future.

I also have a couple GPU VPS instances that I can spin up when needed. Running them full time is too cost prohibitive, but in the event that I need to take any of the transcoders offline (for maintenance, etc.) I can use these VPS to maintain capacity.

Current set price per pixel is: 800 wei

Fees and rewards:

I am starting with a 10% reward cut and a 90% fee cut. I intend to maintain a higher fee cut initially so that I can invest the proceeds in expansion of ftkuhnsman capacity and cover the cost of operations. However, over time I will reduce the reward cut to share more profits with my delegators. Alternately, I intend to keep the reward cut low with the hope that my delegators will continue to stake their proceeds with ftkuhnsman. All that said, I am open and willing to consider all opinions/feedback of anyone who decides to stake with ftkuhnsman.

Currently due to low stake and high gas fees, rewards are not being called frequently. As stake increases, I will increase the frequency of reward calls.

Delegate your LPT tokens here:
https://explorer.livepeer.org/accounts/0x4a43b1d7e6227c8b0512e413f406555647ff7bdb/campaign

If you would like to reach out feel free to message me on Discord or post here in the forum.

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UPDATE: Both transcoder nodes have been moved from Windows to Linux infrastructure.

I will also be changing the fee cut to 60%. As you will see in the livepeer explorer my orchestrator is consistently in the top 10 performance list. Now I just need stake to start getting a consistent workload; my orchestrator is ready to handle it. Any and all stakers are welcome and appreciated!

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Taking down the orch / transcoders this afternoon briefly to upgrade my internet bandwidth. I’m not sure if having the orchestrator offline will affect performance scores, but if it does that’s the reason.

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Latest configuration updates are as follows:

±-----------------+
|ORCHESTRATOR STATS|
±-----------------+
---------------------------------------------------*
| Status | Registered |
---------------------------------------------------*
| Active | true |
---------------------------------------------------*
| Service URI | https://155.138.233.22:8935 |
---------------------------------------------------*
| Delegated Stake | 80.512264738029362572 LPT |
---------------------------------------------------*
| Reward Cut (%) | 10 |
---------------------------------------------------*
| Fee Cut (%) | 50 |
---------------------------------------------------*
| Last Reward Round | 2240 |
---------------------------------------------------*
| Base price per pixel | 1000 wei / 1 pixels |

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Hi, thanks for the updates, I am happy to have staked my LPT stash with you. I hope that things are going well with the transcoder project, it has been a while.

Keep up the good work and good luck!
Mihaylo

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Hi Mihaylo,

Thank you for your support! Things are going well with my transcoding setup; no major issues or downtime. Unfortunately, total stake on my orchestrator is still pretty low and it won’t be feasible to call LPT rewards daily. As soon as my stake reaches a level where it’s economically feasible I will start calling reward.

Feel free to reach out any time!

Joey

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Hi,

Great, thanks! Good luck, no worries and no hurry - I have full faith in what you are doing.

Best,
Mihaylo

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I am proud to announce that ftkuhnsman has received its first winning ticket (2 actually). I am going to wait a bit longer for a lower gas price before claiming the earned fees.

Thank you for staking!
Joey

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Hi all,

I am excited to announce that ftkuhnsman now has transcoders located in both the US and Europe, and geolocation routing has been successfully implemented (using the method defined by @Titan-Node). As a result, our latency scores in the Europe regions have increased and our overall global score puts us in the top 20 Orchestrators by performance.

We have also implemented transcoder capacity auto-scaling. Whenever demand exceeds our current transcoding capacity (i.e., our physical transcoders), virtual transcoders will temporarily spin up to take on additional streams. This allows us to handle more work during spikes in demand in a cost-efficient manner.

All that said, I would like to highlight why we believe it is beneficial for delegators to stake with us:

  • For those of you who may not be aware, there are two ways that delegators earn value from an Orchestrator: (1) a share of the daily LPT rewards (i.e., the fee cut), and (2) a share of Ethereum fees earned by our Orchestrator through transcoding (i.e., the reward cut). Given we do not have a sufficient level of stake to profitably claim the daily LPT rewards, we will continue to keep our fee cut at or close to 50%. That means that we are sharing half of all Ethereum earned by our orchestrator with our delegators.
  • We are extremely focused on ensuring that our Orchestrator remains a top performer and will continue to take all necessary steps to maintain that goal (e.g., we implemented geographic diversification and we have also updated our Orchestrator’s hardware to ensure it can handle periods of high traffic / full saturation).

As always, please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any feedback to provide, or questions about our setup or the Livepeer network in general.

Best Regards,
Joey

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Hi bro, are you interested in deply a hub in Spain?

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Hi Gustavo,

At this time we already have excess capacity in Europe and are not currently looking to onboard any new transcoders in that region. However, as Livepeer adoption and demand for more capacity increases, we will actively look to onboard more transcoders. Future communications will be made through this forum so stay tuned in the coming months. Also feel free to DM me in discord if you would like to pitch us your setup. We are a relatively small pool at this point and are highly selective in adding new partners.

Thank you for reaching out!

Joey

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Update on Current Hardware/Capacity
Hi all, I wanted to provide an update on the current capacity of ftkuhnsman. We have configured multiple physical transcoders, each with multiple Nvidia GPUs, as follows:

USA Transcoder - 70 total stream capacity
1x GTX1060 - 12 stream capacity
1x GTX1070 - 14 stream capacity
2x GTX980ti - 10 stream capacity (20 total)
1x RTX2070 - 16 stream capacity
1x QuadroP400 - 8 stream capacity
bandwidth - 900/900 mb/s

Europe Transcoder - 58 total stream capacity
2x GTX1080 - 20 stream capacity each (40 total)
1x GTX1660ti - 18 stream capacity
bandwidth - 900/900 mb/s

In total, ftkuhnsman currently supports a total of 128 streams. Further we will continue to scale capacity to meet future demand as Livepeer adoption continues.

We continue to focus on uptime/reliability, and have consistently stayed in the top 5 orchestrators by performance. All we need is the community’s support to grow. If you are a LPT token holder looking to stake with a strong performing orchestrator, please consider staking with ftkuhnsman.

https://explorer.livepeer.org/accounts/0x4a43B1D7e6227C8b0512e413F406555647ff7bdB/staking

Happy Transcoding!
Joey

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Ftkuhnsman has a new website. check it out!

https://livepeer.ftkuhnsman.com/

Feedback on how to improve it and/or feature suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Also, our forum handle may be misleading (setup the forum account up before branding the ftkuhnsman node). If you are looking to reach us, we are:
ftkuhnsman#5819 on discord
u/ftkuhnsman on reddit
@ftkuhnsman on twitter
email us at admin@ftkuhnsman.com
drop us a message on our website (link above, scroll to bottom of any page)

Happy Transcoding!
Joey

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Ftkuhnsman is upgrading hardware on our USA transcoder and will be down for some period of time today. This may effect our near term performance scores, but we expect to be back at the top in a short time.

Joey

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Hardware upgrades are complete. We now support a total of 132 streams.

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Thank you 0x21b2a11beb322823097e9de08247a1cc0114cc79 for staking with us. Your support is greatly appreciated!

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Hi, just curious. How far away are you in terms of LPT staked when claiming LPT rewards make sense. Trying to understand the math of all this a little better. Thanks!

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It largely depends on the price of LPT. I think estimates right now at about 10-20k LPT need to be staked to break even. So we are only at about 10% of what is required. That’s why we have our fee cut so low. Until we can call daily reward our fee cut will stay at or close to 50%

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Any guidance on when to move my stake over to your campaign? I’ve got some LPT in my wallet and some with another LivePeer orchestrator. Gas fees are crazy so keeping an eye out for a good time to make the move.

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Hi CryptoCO.

We appreciate your interest in delegating with us. Unfortunately, gas prices remain prohibitively high, so it’s hard to say when the best time will be. The best guidance I can offer is to monitor gas prices and make the move when they are low, but it’s hard to say when that will be.

Joey
Ftkuhnsman

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