 StreamETH enables event organizers, communities and content creators to livestream and share video, in a decentralized way

Open-source video content management system (CMS)

In three hectic and exciting weeks in 2021, software engineer 

 and his team built an open-source livestreaming player, 

StreamETH attracted instant kudos and was used as the livestreaming solution for important web3 events including 

. Now the newest iteration, StreamETH 2.0, will be in the spotlight again – as the livestream provider for 

Pablo discovered Livepeer long before he conceived the idea for StreamETH. He’d been working in web2, livestreaming private group events. While he loved the creativity of his work, he found infrastructure on AWS to be prohibitively expensive.

“When I started looking for a decentralized solution and found Livepeer, I realized there was no need to pay high prices for transcoding. I was cutting my costs 10x.”

While the initial attraction may have been price, it was the Livepeer community and the web3 philosophy that captivated him. He was eager to contribute and soon became an active and committed part of the Livepeer ecosystem. He provided feedback to the Livepeer core team, ran an orchestrator node, and even set up a Livepeer channel for the Spanish community on Telegram.

Then, in 2020, the Ethereum Foundation reached out to Livepeer, seeking a decentralized streaming solution for Devconnect.

“They really needed someone from a broadcasting perspective, so Livepeer said to us, ‘Hey, maybe you could look into this.’ It was these two teams coming together who really believed in open source, and we also had a direct necessity. So we said, ‘let’s make StreamETH.’”

Pablo and his co-founders quickly spun up a prototype and put it through an intense and successful road-test at Devconnect. Pablo said organizers’ willingness to take a chance on a nascent project felt like “a magic opportunity” to the team.

At the conference, Pablo was immediately struck by attendees’ enthusiasm about the prospect of an open-source alternative for content distribution. Devconnect also offered a lesson in how eager projects are to enable monetization on their platforms. Several have been in touch since to talk about how to make this happen.

Now the StreamETH team is working on a complete UI design and adding new features and functionalities, most importantly the ability for developers to add plug-ins to the application.

“It’s now a more thought-out product philosophy. We’re looking to reproduce what Wordpress is doing in the content management system (CMS) space, but for video. We want to be a one-stop place for video content and distribution, focused towards events and their organizers.”

Devcon will be the biggest challenge to date, with 32 concurrent livestreams, including back-ups and translations into local languages. But Pablo says it will be a superb showcase for what StreamETH and Livepeer Studio can do together.

So what comes next? Pablo has a long list of plans, not least of which is finding a way for viewers to safely interact with one another on StreamETH to offer more of a community feel. And since web3 principles are central to StreamETH’s ethos, the team wants to one day delegate governance to the ecosystem.

“Our goal is to provide a service for the ages, not just something we can earn money from. Video is a great chunk of the internet’s bandwidth. Centralized providers control most of it and YouTube and Twitter own most of the content.”

StreamETH offers event organizers a streaming solution that is true to all the values of web3: open source, user owned, and adaptable. Pablo’s goal now is to attract more innovators to work on the protocol and to create more plug-ins.

“We want to attract builders to work on this and create more plug-ins for StreamETH. It’s a community project. We have to embrace it and move as far away from YouTube and Twitter as possible. That’s the main goal. Having a web3 event that’s not dependent on centralized identities is a massive win.”

How to Analyze Livepeer Video Engagement Metrics with Timeplus

 Lenstube offers video on demand for both long-form and short-form videos

web3 social platform for video sharing built on Lens Protocol

 is a web3 social platform for video sharing that combines the best of traditional video-sharing platforms with the latest web3 functionalities. Whether you're a professional creator or an amateur, Lenstube gives you the ability to upload and monetize your video content with ease. Currently, Lenstube offers video on demand for both long-form videos and short-form videos.

Lenstube sets itself apart from traditional video-sharing platforms by incorporating web3 features such as connecting to a crypto wallet, enabling creators to receive tips in MATIC coins, collecting videos as NFTs, and charging membership fees for subscribers. These features are made possible through Lenstube's implementation of various web3 technologies, including Livepeer, Arweave, IPFS, and Lens. By utilizing decentralized technologies, Lenstube is revolutionizing the way creators can share and monetize their content, and provides a new and exciting way to engage with their audience.

 founded Lenstube with the goal of creating a decentralized video sharing platform for content creators. The idea for Lenstube came about after Sasi saw some of his favorite creators, who were creating and teaching web3, being unjustly removed from traditional web2 platforms. This led Sasi to understand the importance of web3 for content creators, and the significance of permanent data storage and content ownership. With this in mind, Sasi set out to create his own web3 video-sharing platform. The first step in this process was to find a video-on-demand service that transcodes and serves video from Arweave.

“I knew that creating a video delivery infrastructure and transcoding videos would be a significant challenge, and I definitely didn't want to spend all my time and resources on these technicalities, especially in the early stages of development. Luckily, I discovered Livepeer on the sponsor list of one of the EthGlobal hackathons. Livepeer provided exactly what I needed to move Lenstube forward, and integrating it into my platform was one the first, and easiest, decisions I made.”

Lenstube's partnership with Livepeer has been a vital component of the platform's success. Currently, all videos on Lenstube, whether they are long or short form, are powered by Livepeer. This means that Livepeer handles all the technical aspects of video delivery, such as ingesting, processing, and transcoding. This has afforded Sasi and the Lenstube team the freedom to focus on other important growth areas, like attracting new creators to the platform and improving user experience.

“Working with Livepeer has definitely been a great experience, and we receive tons of support from the team. Recently, Livepeer launched a feature that displays view counts beneath the video player. We were able to implement this feature pretty quickly, and the team was available to answer any questions we had. Although, most of the time we don’t really need the support, as the guides and docs for the Livepeer SDK and API are awesome.”

Today, Lenstube is thriving and making significant strides in its development. The platform has reached notable milestones, such as surpassing 10,000 video uploads in December 2022, averaging more than 1,000 daily sessions, and reaching more than 50,000 average monthly users in January 2023. These milestones demonstrate the effectiveness of the Lenstube team's efforts and the growing appeal of the platform among content creators and viewers alike.

Lenstube boasts a user-friendly interface that includes all of the features commonly found on traditional web2 video sharing platforms. The front page prominently showcases the most recent and popular short-form (Bytes) and long-form videos hosted on the platform, which can be filtered by video category for easy browsing. Users can log in with their Lens handle on the top right corner of the page. Additionally, various exploration tools can be found on the left-hand menu bar for easy access.

Bytes are short-form, vertical videos that are similar to TikToks and YouTube Shorts. Users can scroll through a feed, like and dislike videos, subscribe to channels, and share Bytes via URL or embed videos directly on websites. Additionally, Bytes can be easily shared on Lenster, Twitter, Reddit, and LinkedIn.

Sasi and the Lenstube team have recently made a concerted effort to develop the Bytes feature. This effort was motivated by the increasing popularity of short-form videos on web2 platforms. Not only do short videos have high user retention rates, but they also provide creators with an effective way to capture an audience and lead them to content on other platforms.

“In my opinion, short-form videos are one of the most effective ways to share content with a wide audience, and they offer creators greater opportunities for engagement. We predict that the use of short-form videos as NFTs will become a popular trend in the web3 community."

Do you want to build your own web3 short-form video app? Disrupt TikTok with this 

 walking through the key components of building a social app with quick, bite-sized video.

Lenstube also enables creators to upload long-form, horizontal videos that are similar to standard YouTube videos. In addition to features found on Bytes, these long-form videos also include view counts, video descriptions, and a comment section.

Every video hosted on Lenstube is equipped with a variety of web3 features. These features not only enable content creators to earn revenue from their videos, but also provide fans with a way to support their favorite creators. This is what sets Lenstube apart from traditional web2 video sharing platforms. Some of the web3 features that Lenstube offers include:

Mirroring across Lens, with custom referral fees

Default sharing of all Lenstube videos across Lens ecosystem apps

Lenstube’s frontend was built using Next.Js, an open-source React framework for web applications. Lenstube uses Apollo Client to manage local and remote data, and to fetch data and do mutations through the Lens Protocol’s GraphQL backend.

Middleware is like a “software glue” that acts as a bridge between different technologies, tools, and databases so they can be integrated into a single system. Lenstube uses Lens Protocol’s indexer for its middleware, and this indexer streamlines data between Lens contracts and viewers. The Lens indexer is a GraphQL server that listens to events from Lens contracts and stores the data into a database. This indexer enables viewers to quickly and efficiently access video data, which leads to a better user experience.

Lenstube’s backend consists of four main components: Livepeer, Arweave, IPFS, and Lens

Lenstube uses Livepeer to process and play back video. Livepeer is a protocol built on Ethereum that distributes video transcoding work throughout its decentralized network. The protocol provides cost efficient, secure, and reliable infrastructure. Livepeer's mainnet launch took place in 2018 and the network now processes millions of minutes of video each week.

Lenstube stores its video files on Arweave and IPFS, web3 protocols that offer data storage on decentralized networks. Arweave and IPFS offer permanent and immutable data storage, and anyone can store data in the networks or offer storage space, without there being a centralized point of failure.

Lenstube uses Lens for its social graph. The Lens social graph is fully composable, open source, and decentralized. This helps transfer full rights and complete ownership of content into the hands of creators.

Sasi intends to improve the Lenstube platform by adding new features, with the primary objective of providing exceptional user experience and boosting user engagement on the platform. Furthermore, Sasi is currently building a mobile application that specifically caters to short-form videos, which will be released soon. This further solidifies his belief that short-form videos represent a rapidly expanding area in the video industry and is positioning Lenstube to capitalize on this growth potential.

If you’re a developer that would like to build your own web3 video app, check out these 

 to get started. If you have any questions about building, 

Lenstube is a web3 social platform for video sharing that combines the best of traditional video-sharing platforms with the latest web3 functionalities. Whether you're a professional creator or an amateur, Lenstube gives you the ability to upload and monetize your video content with ease. Currently, Lenstube offers video on demand for both long-form videos and short-form videos.

How Lenstube Changed Video Sharing in Web3

StreamETH enables event organizers, communities and content creators to livestream and share video, in a decentralized way.

StreamETH Brings IRL Ethereum Events Online