Advised by the co-founders of YouTube and Twitch, Theta announces a blockchain-based video delivery network

CUPERTINO, California – (BUSINESS WIRE) – By 2020, 82% of all internet traffic will be video. The video content and streaming market, which currently accounts for 67% of internet traffic, is a multi-billion dollar industry that continues to explode. However, today’s ecosystem is highly centralized and inefficient, resulting in poor quality streaming, high content delivery costs, and limited revenue return to content creators. The problem is only exacerbated with new streaming technologies such as 360 ° Virtual Reality (VR). The solution is a decentralized peer-to-peer network that uses the power of the blockchain.

Theta Labs (www.thetatoken.org), a subsidiary of SLIVER.tv, a leading VR live streaming company, announces a decentralized streaming network powered by users and a new native blockchain. The founding team has over 30 years of video streaming experience with consultants including Steve Chen, co-founder of YouTube, and Justin Kan, co-founder of Twitch.

Theta is an open source protocol that was specially developed for the decentralized streaming network and enables vertical decentralized apps (DApps) to be set up on the platform in order to broadcast esports, music, TV / films, education, corporate conferences, peer to peer streaming and more. The DApp from SLIVER.tv will be the first application that is based on the Theta network and uses the existing user base of millions of eSport viewers.

The core of the network enables users worldwide with unused PC bandwidth and resources to cache video streams and forward them to others in the network and in turn mine theta tokens, similar to Bitcoin and Ethereum. This is especially valuable in many parts of the world with spotty internet connections. Imagine a user in the middle of Brazil goes to sleep with their computer on, wakes up in the morning and has made a few dollars by running their Theta app in the background. The decentralized peer-to-peer network will enable much more efficient and high quality streaming. Content publishers and creators no longer need to develop expensive infrastructure, which enables the creation of original content and novel business models.

The Theta Blockchain is the only end-to-end infrastructure for decentralized video streaming and delivery that offers and uses both technical and economic solutions:

• Reputation-dependent mining – When a caching node mines a new theta block, it calculates a reputation score for itself. The reputation rating is a measure of the amount of video stream data that was transmitted in a current time window. A high reputation score increases the block reward and in turn encourages the caching node to share more videos.

• Global Reputation Consensus – When a new block is mined, all Caching Nodes must check the reputation score of the Caching Node that mined the block, thus forming a global consensus on the block reward.

• Proof-of-Engagement – Provides evidence that viewers are legitimately consuming the video streams, and provides advertisers with transparency and a foundation for viewers to earn theta tokens in return for interacting with the content.

“We’ve been on the cutting edge of live streaming technology and we’re really going to be able to transform the video and entertainment industries by leveraging the blockchain,” said Mitch Liu, Co-Founder and CEO of Theta Labs, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of SLIVER.tv. “Theta is uniquely designed to take advantage of the blockchain’s incentive mechanisms and allow end users to free up their excess PC bandwidth and resources to relay video streams to others while earning theta tokens. It’s a win-win situation for everyone involved in the ecosystem. ”

“Theta’s innovation will transform today’s online video industry in much the same way that YouTube’s 2005 platform transformed traditional video. One of our biggest challenges was the high cost of delivering video to different parts of the world, and the problem only gets worse with HD, 4K, and higher quality video streams, ”said Steve Chen, YouTube co-founder. “I’m excited to be part of the next evolution in streaming, helping Theta build a decentralized peer-to-peer network that offers improved video delivery at a lower cost.”

Other advisors include Professor Shoucheng Zhang, founder of Danhua Capital, Fan Zhang, founding member of Sequoia Capital China, Travis Skewers, founder of CoinMkt, one of the first US Bitcoin exchanges, Rajeev Surati, MIT Phd in video compression and streaming, Sebastian Serrano, Founders of Ripio, the first global credit network on blockchain, Cliff Morgan, CEO of GFUEL, Sam Wick, head of UTA Ventures, and Dennis Fong, CEO of Plays.tv alias “Thresh”, the world champion of Quake / Doom.

In December, Theta ERC20-compatible tokens will be implemented on the SLIVER.tv platform as application tokens for virtual gifts and incentives for streamers. In addition, they are used by advertisers and brand sponsors to fund their advertising campaigns and support key content creators. These ERC20 tokens will be exchangeable 1: 1 for native theta tokens when the new blockchain is introduced for the 4th quarter of 2018. Pre-registration is now possible for the public token sale, which is scheduled to begin in January 2018.

Learn more by reading Theta’s whitepaper.

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About Theta Labs, Inc .:

Theta Labs, Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of SLIVER.tv in Delaware C-corp, a leading esports live streaming platform with over 1 million monthly active users. SLIVER.tv is backed by $ 17M in funding for top tier Silicon Valley VCs including Danhua Capital, DCM, Sierra Ventures, Venture Reality Fund, leading Hollywood / media investors including Creative Artists Agency, BDMI, Greycroft GC Tracker, Advancit Capital and top Japanese mobile gaming companies such as GREE and Colopl. The company also holds four patents, the most recent of which addresses the problem of generating highly efficient spherical videos for VR 360 ° streaming. For more information, visit us at www.ThetaToken.org.