LPT vs THETA - The Future of Video, Storage, and LivestreamingBack in 2020, YouTube's #1 Creator, PewDiePie (Felix Kjellberg), announced that he would start streaming on DLive -- one of the first "working" crypto-based livestreaming service at the time. "Working" is in quotes since the partnership didn't last very long (YouTube eventually signed an exclusive rights deal with Kjellberg) and whether or not the platform is actually decentralized and censorship resistant is somewhat debatable.
DLive later moved its platform onto TRON (under Justin Sun) -- then was later acquired by BitTorrent and now uses BTT as its currency layer. There's a whole story behind that whole series of transactions too (including the rise and fall of DTube), but we'll stay focused on the crypto livestream/video market for now.
Right now the two big contenders in the crypto livestream/video markets are Livepeer (LPT) and Theta (THETA). Both projects claim to be the future of video -- which is decentralized, ubiquitous, and always available at any time. Livepeer is an open-source platform where anyone can build anything on top -- whereas Theta (founded by former YouTube co-founder, Steven Chen) is more of an enterprise-driven project with the backing of well-known, major companies out there. The differences in style and how they talk about themselves as a project is pretty stark, to say the least.
Right now the biggest bottleneck in the NFT market is storage and bandwidth capacity -- it's no secret that we live in a world where most people come to expect video as their primary source of content, but due to technical limitations (video, especially livestreaming, requires an exponentially higher amount of bandwidth/space) a lot of NFT projects out there avoided the issue by simply scaling down to simple images of apes, punks, and rocks. Most people working in content know, however, that video is where things need to eventually go, but in order for that to happen, there needs to be major upgrades done on the backend in order to accommodate the massive amounts of bandwidth that video systems require.
Web3 is only just getting started, in other words.
Filecoin (FILE) and Theta have a similar pattern since they both tend to target enterprise-level customers as their main focus, where as STORJ has a similar pattern to LPT and ETH since they're more open-sourced and decentralized. The patterns and where the money is coming from seem to be very clear, here.
Which will win out in the end? We don't know, yet. It's doubtful that the viewer really cares about where their content is coming from or how it's hosted -- the platform that entertains them the most is probably where they will go. In a way, this is just the eternal contest between small vs big production values -- maybe there may be room for both in the future. Which platform will create the most interesting content?
