It’s been a little while since the last forum weekly update, as we’ve been publishing weekly bullet points in the excellent Proof of Work Newsletter. Still, happy to be back here to provide more detail on what’s going on with Livepeer!
Network Launch Approaching
- Livepeer has been live on Ethereum’s Rinkeby Testnet for a couple weeks.
- Internal smart contract audits are complete.
- External smart contract audits with Trail of Bits are in their final week.
- The native client, the explorer, and accompanying tools are continuously being developed to support the launch for end users.
After we address any issues that are surfaced in the external audit, Livepeer will be ready to deploy it’s alpha to the Ethereum mainnet, so look for more news in the coming weeks.
Client Update
There has been a flurry of bug fixes, but the big news in the latest release is that users no longer have to install ffmpeg in order to run Livepeer. This dependency created all sorts of installation difficulties, and inconsistencies when encoding video. Now, due to the solid work of j0sh, there is a native integration with libav, and there’s no longer this dependency. Running livepeer is as simple as downloading the release, and running livepeer --rinkeby.
Explorer
The explorer continues to improve, with a focus on helping mainstream users participate in the delegation and transcoder election protocol at the time of launch.
At the protocol level this is an intricate task that requires some research and understanding the protocol details, economics, and Ethereum transaction types. The goal of the transcoder interface is to attempt to help users understand this process as they’re going through it, as well as to gently guide them through anything that can cause the process to fail or go awry.
Livepeer TV
The Livepeer TV project continues to produce great content and test the system in the early days as a real user. It’s attempting to be the first 24/7 TV station streaming on decentralized infrastructure. In the words of it’s lead @chrishobcroft
- You can watch at www.livepeer.tv (not currently online, but approaching 24/7)
- The schedule of what’s coming up is published at http://schedule.livepeer.tv
- The interactions with Ethereum blockchain are shown at http://blockchain.livepeer.tv
- The interface to explore the node is http://explorer.livepeer.tv
- And a curated archive of live content is available at http://archive.livepeer.tv
Some of the events that have been streamed in the last week include:
And while these are “dead” versions of the original livestreams, the recommended consumption experience is to just leave a browser tab open to livepeer.tv and be surprised at what shows up 
Community
We are delighted to have Raffi Sapire join Livepeer as Director of Operations. She comes from an investing background with Blue Seed Capital, and is the founder of NastyGap.com which has the mission of eliminating the workplace gender pay gap. Welcome Raffi!
After presenting at ETHDenver and participating in the hackathon, we also had a couple team members spend a week with the Truebit team at their hacker house working on a proof of concept integration, and this week @ericxtang attended the #ScalingNow conference and EthCC to present on streaming in web3.