FreeStream

This live streaming product is built on all web3 tools like metamask, unlock, textile, ipfs, filecoin & livepeer. and it allows influencers, or really anyone, to connect with an audience they have on an open, decentralized streaming platform. This project leverages existing protocols on the Ethereum network to create a streaming service that gives power back to content-creators and Influencers. It enables users to start a stream, create events, and then restrict content for monetization purposes. Organizations can also use this tool for meetings and verification through content restriction. Finally, users can upload files to IPFS through Textile buckets for storage. A more specific summary of the protocols and integration follows in an excerpt from our white paper(https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3856345): LivePeer is an open-source streaming platform that takes advantage of bandwidth and computing resources to drastically reduce the cost of rendering video. Built on the Ethereum Blockchain, it uses crypto economic concepts to encourage participation and drive bootstrapping. LivePeer has its own token, and encourages developers to build on its open-source framework. Unblock is a decentralized protocol for memberships that allows users to monetize their content without having to rely on third-party services. It allows creators to lock their content to viewers until a certain payment or requirement has been passed. Unlock reduces the disparity in power between websites and content creators by providing a seamless platform for monetization. Textile enable users to upload content to an IPFS network with ease. By using the “Hub”, users, programmers, content creators and organizations can upload files and other data to the decentralized web. In tandem with Filecoin, which is a decentralized storage platform on the Ethereum Blockchain, Textile manages to provide an innovative way to deploy content to a decentralized web. FreeStream is an application built on all three of these platforms. It uses LivePeer to power its streaming services and allow content creators to share content with anyone who has an internet connection. Individuals and organizations that use FreeStream can take advantage of Unlock’s capabilities, which is seamlessly integrated into the main streaming platform, to restrict content. Furthermore, FreeStream takes advantage of Textile(and to a lesser extent, Filecoin) by leveraging their storage to allow users to upload any files they want. Finally, all of FreeStream is hosted through Textile. We didn't get as far as we would have liked this weekend, as we had big aspirations for creating a DAO governed live streaming system, owned by the people who create the content on the platform, but nonetheless, we are excited to have created a POC using nearly all web3 tools!

The live streaming app is built with Livepeer and Unlock. We used Javascript, Typescript, HTML & CSS. It took us a while to boil down from what we wanted to do, to what was feasible to do in one weekend. We did a deep dive on many of these web3 tools that had never built with before, so we leveraged existing codebases to hack our final product together. For the file upload, we used textile to hack together a minimum viable product that leverages Filecoin and Bucket APIs for the purpose of allowing users to upload files. Most of this was coded using Javascript and React. We were partially inspired by an app called nextbuckets that used Textile Buckets, but we integrated this code base with full Filecoin authentication and managed to also include ThreadDB so that the user can access important files later. A majority of our work is hosted on Textile, where we made an organization through the Hub CLI and then uploaded files through our own buckets, which were then served to us through Threads.