Streameth: Decentralized Video CMS by Pablo Voorvaart | Devcon Bogotá

foreign [Music] and today I'm going to speak about streamies um a project I've been working on with the ethereum foundation and the guys from life here um it's a project that we're using right now to stream Defcon so if you go to live.defcon.org you can actually follow all the sessions there um so yeah I'll be speaking about what treatment is how it works and why we need stream it actually which I think is the most important thing and then I'll go over a bit of history on how the application came to to be um where we used it and also how the future is going to look like for streamies so what is three myth there is a very official definition that I made up yesterday so um streaming is a self-hosted application that event organizers can use to host their virtual events like I said streaming was born out of a collaboration between ethereum Foundation life here and myself and it all started with ethereum Foundation wanting to decouple this term from YouTube and they wanted to do three simple things at first so our current version of Streamys those these three simple things fairly good I think so stream we wanted to live stream the events of course without relying on YouTube and we wanted to also show a schedule of these sessions and for each talk and after the event was done we wanted to record and show the recording of all the sessions that we've streamed right so when we started designing the the application we decided that we wanted to mimic um kind of how the application looked like we wanted to mimic it to what a real event is so we designed everything around rooms and sessions right so one event has multiple rooms and one room has multiple sessions and so then from then on we started building streamies the first thing we focused on was was on live streaming so each room can have one live stream um through through the whole application you can concurrently stream on multiple rooms so today at inline in Defcon we're concurrently live streaming nine multiple rooms which I think is pretty cool we also focus on uptime and we're building a failover mechanism into our playback systems that allows a single room to ingest two sources that have the same content to fail over to one or the other in case there were errors in the broadcasting on one of the sources um you might be wondering what we use instead of YouTube and that is of course very interesting and that's where life here life here comes in stream it is actually provider agnostic which means that we don't do any of the broadcasting ourselves right we just we are just a front-end that hooks into Whatever video provider we want in our case we build a solution by default on top of life here which is an awesome protocol that some of you may know I know these guys know them because they're the core developers so yeah um life areas are the centralized video streaming Network built on ethereum blockchain a library can currently distribute live and on-demand content [Music] um so yeah it's pretty cool I'll go more in depth on why we chose live here later but you can imagine it's a protocol built on ethereum so decentralization censorship assistant and all the nice things about decentralization right and so like I said the application is provided agnostic but there's already a out of the box solution that integrates with life here so you can start up Streamys a set up your lifer account and start streaming decentralized then we also put a lot of focus into the schedule this is because stream it is not only something you can use to live stream but it's actually something that we wanna that event organizers want to use to like I said replicate the uh the event experience experience but virtually right so the schedule as always is a very important part of any event especially events like Defcon where you have a lot of sessions in another rooms you kind of want to automate the process of scheduling everything and showing the information in nice in a nice accessible way so we built a schedule by the way I'm talking about the features then I will do a live demo and showcase the application because I know it might be a bit difficult to imagine what I'm saying right now um so yeah this guyo is a very central part of of streamies we build multiple Integrations with different schedule providers Defcon is using pre-talks as a schedule manager which is and a pre-talk is an open source tool for for management that the Devcon team is using to organize all the sessions and and all the rooms so we built an integration with their API and that's also available in three meets so if you're an event organizer you can spin up a pretalks incense and you know get going with that and have a pretty nice schedule functionality there um also the application has a internal clock which will basically sync you up with the latest sessions and always display kind of the current information on which stock is happening and all of that but I think that's better too that you guys see it in a live demo that I'm going to show later then of course like we said On Demand with the playback that is also crucial for the for the event organizers actually most of the views for events happen during on demand playback so a live video don't usually get too many views but then when you when you saw the video and you show it on demand because of the content we're showing here in the stocks is very interesting you know people go and watch it so yeah this is also currently all the on-demand video that we are hosting on different stream with instances it's also living on their life your network they recently developed their video on demand features so it's working very nicely um and I'll also Show an example of a streaming instance where we used video on demand it was at East Berlin last month it worked very very nicely so I'll show a demo of that as well and finally plugins and I think this is the most interesting feature and so the software architecture that we built was taught to contain this plug-in feature right so essentially we in the long term of course we want different protocols to build plugins into streaming so that they can integrate their features into the application right so for instance we are working with radical to integrate radical drips and that will allow to I don't know if you guys know radical drips but it's basically a a product that allows to have tipping on web interfaces so you could have a streaming stream instance where you're live streaming an event and then you have the radical drips plugin and so users of that viewers of that event could donate directly to the speakers which I think is pretty cool right so the plugin um architecture is there now we need to develop the ecosystem and you know bring people in to develop this plugins for us oh and this is the slide where I show the live demo so I'm gonna uh yeah yes so this is the stream instance that we use for a Defcon and we can see there that the biggest buffering because the Wi-Fi isn't the best in the world but yeah so like I said we are live streaming through life here this is the main stage as you guys can see so even though network connections are pretty it's working fine right so Props to the live routine um in this case we also added a YouTube link so the good thing was about streaming is that because it's an open source application each instance can be adjusted to the needs of the event right so for this in this case for Defcon a we also wanted to include a YouTube stream for a you know to to have the maximum reach and so we have we're streaming both on library and YouTube and with other with other added this nice switcher in the bottom so you can switch between like I said then the schedule for this instance we build the schedule into a nice navigation bar on the right panel of the page you can kind of look through all the talks so yeah when I refresh you guys can see that the schedule kind of synced to the latest hour and so this should be me oh no I'm this is talk five this is not my stage so yeah right now in stage five how to scale the blockchain is happening and so that's what that's the internal clock feature that I was talking about um and yeah it's pretty simple but it works and like we said I'm going to show also and this is The Ether Lane streaming that we deployed and this is a custom schedule schedule page that we built and so this is containing all of the sessions for Ether Lane you can filter by state stages and days and so when you click on a session it goes to the session page and it loads up the VOD content and also some speaker information and kind of like the description of the event and let's see if the VOD video like go check it out watch the etherlin.org and it's very good content so yeah like I said at the beginning three basic features but very powerful uh and you know very effective as well because the main goal was to decouple uh Eve events and community events of centralized platforms like YouTube right so I think even though it's nothing fancy we're not tweets we don't do VR we don't do 3d nothing it really serves a purpose right and and now because I'm talking about purpose I want to go into a bit of the ethics on why we built we built this why we think it's important and why a yeah no why we built this and why we think it's important I think that's it yeah yeah most of the web 3 events are being broadcasted using centralized providers and this sucks a lot and it's not just because I say that it actually sucks um like we all know YouTube and twitch don't realign with a core values of decentralization that we you know that we're all here for and that we believe in uh so stream it is you know should be a good first step to help these communities decouple from from these Services right so now we're going to look a bit of what are the problem problems about that you get with using a YouTube right so the first one is pretty clear a YouTube and twitch and others are censorship prone um so yeah here I I put two tweets and the first one was at East Barcelona and the live stream was taken down because they had some copyright issues which is usually I mean if event production is pretty hard and you have all kinds of audio you have all kinds of music and sometimes uh some music segments with copyright can slip into the production and then your whole stream gets taken down so that's not good so if Barcelona had one day without streaming and then a there's another tweet about a YouTube account that went got taken down because they were talking about web free content on YouTube so yeah there were some disputes and YouTube kind of banned their their account right so what is the solution yeah so that's why I'm here talking about Streamys no the solution is you know having a front end so the first one is the front end right you want to deploy the front end on a decentralized storage layer like ipfs or swarm and that is actually one of the next steps we're going to take after Defcon is to make sure the application is lightweight and we can use it and and deploy it in in one of these two layers and the second solution to the problem is using decentralized and with the providers like life here since life here is a decentralized layer of note and the content cannot be really stopped even if the government or the platform any platform says so right the next problem that arises from using um centralized providers is the intellectual property this is kind of tied to the censorship prone issue and so like we said copyright Claims can result in streams being taken down tennis being banned and users being demonetized within Wonder and also it's not only that they're taking down the streams but is the lack of transparency in their process to decide which streams get taken down and which content is being shown or not right so there's really an ethical discussion around what content are we being allowed to see right so using decentralized Services we then really solve this content because there's no moderation right but I think we're heading in the right direction in regards to not allowing this one Central entity to decide what we can see or what we can't see right next will be the high fee to connect creators and this is also very interesting especially recently a twitch I think increased their uh this year they're taking from from content creators from I think it was 15 to 30 percent or something like this because these centralized providers actually super expensive to run right so tweet is even though the free is the content is free it's Mega expensive to run an operation like twitch so in the long term they are they have two solutions and one solution is to increase the share they take him from the creators the other solution is uh to display ads right so yeah moving on to a decentralized solution like streamies and also live here will basically allow us to give back the monetization is a power to the content creator and because then if according to create is using live here to distribute the content the content is actually theirs right so he is then able to decide how he monetizes the content also building on top of the plugin system that we that I was talking about earlier uh we're releasing setting up this ecosystem for developers to come in and build custom Solutions on top of Streamys that they can use to to you know monetize their content so radical drips will be a good example but you know this is web free the best thing we do is create monitoration a route that this is web3 crypto we're good at monetizing without having someone in the middle taking a share of a our money so you guys can figure out the rest uh just build a custom plugin that sends money to one address or the other and we should be solving this issue and finally and that's for me this is the most important one the web free ecosystem and how to Twitch YouTube and others under really respecting the values that we stand for right especially the open source and their communities they build Solutions sometimes and they're trying to get into into web 3 but they're not actually thinking about the community they're not making this code public they're not contributing back to the protocols they use right they're not part of our community and yeah I think we stream it is actually existing because we believe in these ideas and it's coming out of a community effort between the EF life here and me and others the other developers to embrace these ideas right and and trying to help like I said communities decouple from these providers and finally oh no no the most important Slide the members of the team and I want to run off Applause after I say all of the names so um first we have hands which is the guy that developed quite a big chunk of the code he's sitting there in the audience Applause yes then we have Wesley efer he's in there oh I don't know if Akio is here I don't think so he's watching me on the stream Akio what's up he's the designer and then I'm there with the pen that I set for the merch it's my pfp for the Emergency I didn't change it so yeah the panda and that's me and you don't have to clap yeah so yeah it was awesome working with these guys really great things we used it at devconnect that was the first demo that we used it was awesome lots of traction we hacked a demo in like a week and so that's why I'm saying it's a great team because we didn't really plan the development it was just it was really a decentralized development effort because everyone was doing its own thing right so but we go to devconnect it was awesome we got great numbers on viewership and no box I think uh so great then we went to Ether Lane and you know we redid the design and we call this stream stream is 2.0 we added dark mode which is actually the best feature in the whole application uh the schedule and super good there really we had no bugs and I I know this for sure and and overall we're super happy with it and then yeah Defcon which is a great so yeah and how this feature look like we're gonna focus on usability we're going to focus on plugins and we're going to focus on embracing the web 3 ecosystem like we said and yeah and this is kind of like our vision I don't know if you guys know WordPress but the vision that we had since the beginning is to have stream with be WordPress so something so WordPress 4 video right so something that a event organizers can clone and use quickly to to stream their events hello hi Paula thank you for your talk um I am a Bernard organizer and I have used several streaming providers and I like live peer but one thing that worries me is how is the performance compared to other Alternatives like Vimeo YouTube because this is the centralized so this is kind of worry for for events yes so this library is pretty good so I was a pretty early Community member and I've been using it in the early days it had some issues so since the beginning I come from the web to world like production world and you always have failovers and when I started using knife period I was like hey we need to build a failover here so that's why we have built in a failover mechanism into all of our players right so on the one hand life here got really good already on the other hand we have a failover mechanism that allows to basically set two live peer channels for the same room so you have double the reliability so yeah but what about the streaming related to attendees because you have attendees all around the world and streaming providers have like a CDN contact yeah no so how light peers solves that yeah lifer oh there's a bit of a more complex question because you have the life of the protocol and then you have live for your studio but basically live here studio and that's what we are using has its own CDN and agency is pretty good so you shouldn't be have an issue if you have people from around the world trying to watch your stream like I said performance is really good East Berlin we had a bunch of people watching that's kind of bunch of people watching here you know it's Defcon yesterday we had 3K views online and almost no downtime so yeah if you want we can speak later and I can explain a bit more yep thank you