Theta, a project that will revolutionize video streaming
I'm always on the networks looking for news regarding the world of cryptocurrencies, something that seems ingenious, interesting, creative and framed within the decentralized concept. That's how my research process came across a project called Theta, which according to its creators promises to revolutionize the world of streaming video.
As you might expect Theta aims to decentralize video streaming and video on demand. Basically it wants to become a decentralized p2p platform, able to compete with YouTube or Twich, allowing its users to share computing resources and bandwidth as a method to earn tokens. Looking at this mechanism from the outside, its method resembles that used by Ares, that movie and video download platform popular 20 years ago, but this concept presented by Theta seeks to involve a large global community to make the Internet a go-to space for video streaming.
Providing high quality video streaming is an important step towards solving the buffering problems that are so common in this type of technology today. In such sense, by using users' bandwidth and storage it will be possible to reduce the cost of video streaming and improve quality, in addition to receiving a payment in cryptocurrency for providing power to this platform.
According to studies, video streaming is thought to increase at an annual average of over 20% between 2021 and 2027, in turn it is believed that profits from the use of this industry will increase significantly. On the other hand, centralized video distribution networks (VDNs) generally suffer from poor loading times and buffering; a situation that Theta wants to put an end to.
As technologies such as 4K, 8K and virtual reality (VR) become more popular, Theta's vision of providing the necessary bandwidth through peer-to-peer delivery becomes more interesting. Improving streaming for users will generate more interest among developers of streaming video content, allowing the community to save on infrastructure costs, increase advertising revenue and generate rewards directly with their own token.
Moreover, last year, Theta announced the inclusion of Google in the project. According to the terms of the partnership, Google will provide Theta's cloud infrastructure, while users of the big "G" can deploy and run nodes on the network. This means that in a direct way Google is getting involved in the cryptocurrency industry, a signal that is expected to boost Theta's position in the cryptocurrency world. Likewise Samsung joined the partnership by introducing the pre-installed Theta.Tv app, a decentralized video streaming platform, on all new smart TVs.
In December 2020, Theta launched the beta version of its decentralized video streaming platform - Edgecast. The Theta blockchain network is secured by a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism, which is much less computationally demanding, and has higher transaction throughput compared to Proof-of-Work protocols. By using PoS as a consensus mechanism it is possible to have many different devices acting as viewers and cache nodes.
Theta has also developed a resource-oriented micropayment pool used to solve scalability issues. Moreover, they are testing a new mining scheme called Proof-of-Engagement, a mechanism to track the delivery of video segments. The management, distribution and collection of rewards on the platform is done through Smart Streaming Contracts, a specific type of smart contracts specific to the Theta Token blockchain.
But what is Proof-of-Engagement? It is a protocol that verifies that users have actually watched a live video. It is a method that attributes transparency to advertisers while constituting a means for the community to earn Theta tokens as a reward for their participation. The Proof-of-Engagement protocol was designed to create a compelling measure of participation in video streams and a reliable way for both users and advertisers to confirm their participation in video streams.
As for the Theta Native Token (THETA) it is the community cryptocurrency that makes life on the Theta network. These tokens help secure the blockchain and are used to provide users with a number of functionalities. On the other hand, there is another token called Theta Fuel (TFUEL), which are given to users who watch streams on the internet and their excess bandwidth is used to share the stream with other viewers.
TFUEL works just like Ethereum Gas and is responsible for interaction with smart contracts on the Theta network. If a network member shares content with other community participants, they can earn more tokens. Moreover, airdrops are planned to be presented every so often for users to get rewards for performing various tasks.
In terms of participation in the network, there are several stakeholders and nodes that help build the Theta Token ecosystem. The network was created with 5 major groups in mind to generate participation:
Streamers: creators of live video content for later consumption are referred to as such. They are rewarded with Theta tokens every time they make a contribution to the system.
Viewers: the consumer users of the service, who, through THETA.tv, watch the work done by the streamers. Viewers are rewarded for watching and participating in the videos and can also choose to be rewarded for watching advertisements.
Advertisers: Through the platform they promote their services and products to the community. They use their Theta tokens to purchase advertising space and to sponsor community members (streamers).
Caching nodes: refers to the computers and servers that support the network caching services to give quality to the video stream and like the rest of the members are also rewarded with Thetas.
Ingest nodes: are those that support the network to provide various bitrates, stream resolutions, among others. They also receive rewards for providing their services for the generation of live streams.
The interesting thing about this project is that just in such a short time already the Theter token is placed in the top ten of cryptocurrencies in the market capitalization, despite the fact that it is still under development and is expected to be launched in the coming months, it seems that it has a lot of global expectation. It will dawn and we will see.
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