LBRY have made their pre release v0.4.4 avail on Github -LBRY.io. This comes just days after releasing news of $500K in funding from Pillar Investments. LBRY hopes to disrupt giants like YouTube and Netflix with huge interest in the project. They claim to have had over 125K people on their beta waiting list and I was one of them. It's good to finally get my hands on a copy of some software to kick the wheels on. If you haven't read it already 
After installing the software you should have a icon on your desktop that you can double click. It will fire up a background process and then open up a browser which is pointed to port 5279. Here is what the LBRY homepage looks like
You'll notice right away the content looks a little weird with mostly mashup music videos. LBRY doesn't want piracy taking place so the content appears to mostly be original or public domain works. This is definitely not a piracy haven.
When I signed up for the beta they mentioned that they would hand out 25LBC free for signups. This is no longer the beta but they were than happy than to send me it in their Slack chatroom and ask one of the mods for a tip.
The LBRY credits arrived in my wallet but there were some transactions with invalid dates in what was supposed to be a brand new wallet. I'm not why those are there but the 25LBC was the only thing in the account.
Publishing content was pretty straight forward. What is odd though is the URL requires you to bid on and warns that I could get out bid in the future. I'm not sure if this feature is such a great idea. I can only see this feature leading to someone making a viral video and then someone else stepping in to outbid them and steal the traffic.
When it was all said and done I got my pick of lbry://bigbuckbunny
Go check it out for the low low price of 0.5LBC!
What was a little annoying was that even though I installed LBRY, my browser still didn't recognize any lbry:// links. As you can see in the image below I had to copy and paste the link from their blog into the the search bar to find the content.
The quality of the video was all right but there was a definite sluggish quality to it. It felt like streaming a torrent there was a lag and buffering issue at the start.
My final thoughts are that so far this is pretty bare bones on the features and still has some issues. This is however still a pre-release and in the absence of anything else this was very welcome. I see this version of the client to be more just to get their foot in the door.
With the release of this software and the $500K LBRY received from Pillar Investments earlier this week I'm quite happy about my decision to buy some LBRY Credits (LBC) and with the price still low I think I'll be grabbing more. I like where this project is headed and like Steemit they have a long way to go and a lot of work ahead but there is a future in decentralization!