StreamSpace Update - July 2018
Dear StreamSpace Community Member,
Thank you for being part of our community! We want to keep you abreast of what we're up to across a variety of technical and business development fronts.
New Advisor!
StreamSpace is proud to introduce our newest advisor:
Lionel Bouchard
Lionel is a software engineering pioneer and a thought leader in video streaming and mobile multimedia technologies. Before founding the mobile multimedia consulting company Ficana, Lionel was the Director of Mobile Streaming at Netflix where he oversaw all of Netflix’s mobile streaming efforts. Previously, Lionel was the System Engineering Director at Texas Instruments and Manager of Software Engineering at RealNetworks. Lionel led the MPEG-4 Systems research project involving the development of multimedia applications integrating audio, video and graphics (MPEG, VRML), streaming over the Internet. Lionel participated extensively in the ISO/MPEG-4 standardization committee via contributions in the definition of the system layers.
Technical Update
We use IPFS as our distributed file system combined with a trust based micropayment system between peers to create a distributed content delivery network. Users pay for every piece of a content they stream or download and also get paid for the content they send others. Unlike traditional blockchain micropayment solutions where users have to open a payment channel in the blockchain before sending a micropayment off-chain, StreamSpace is using a trust based micropayment system in which users send the requested resource to another party as long as they are whitelisted by StreamSpace and sending a micropayment.
This micropayment is a payment confirmation which is stored offline and replaced every time that user receives a new micropayment from the same party that is valid and incremental. Each user has a list of payment confirmations. Each payment confirmation list is maintained for each user who receives and pays for the content. This list is maintained until the current billing period ends. A new list will be created for the next billing cycle. A user must post the last billing period list to our smart contract on the blockchain before the current billing period ends. At the end of the second billing cycle, they know how much they owed or earned. They have to pay before the third billing cycle ends or they will be blacklisted.
The payment mechanism described above is only for paying the storage providers to stream the content; we anticipate that the total payment per gigabyte would be less than a cent. In addition to these transaction costs, the viewers will have to “purchase” the film separately and pay the content owner / royalty owners via our smart contract to get the digital rights to watch the content. If any of the paid or free content is sponsored by an ad, payment for streaming that content will be paid by the ad company.
Ambassador Program
In April, StreamSpace launched its Filmmaker Ambassador program. Ambassadors are filmmakers that commit to work with StreamSpace to promote their independent film projects, eventually using the StreamSpace social media platforms and SVOD service to engage directly with their film viewer fans. StreamSpace supports the filmmakers by posting updates about the filmmakers and their projects on a variety of social media channels, by providing funding and festival information in support of new projects, and supporting trailers and access portals to stream the project film directly where possible.