: Livestream and On-Demand Concert Platform

Fans have historically shown support for their favorite artists by buying records, concert tickets, or merchandise. The allure of streaming platforms didn't change this long-established dynamic.

Even though sales are crucial to any artist's financial well-being, money isn't the only thing that matters to them. Artists also want to engage with their followers in a much closer and direct fashion, which, up until recently, could only be achieved through social media.

Web3 offers a unique opportunity for artists to connect, livestream events, and reward their fans in a way never seen before through the use of tokens and NFTs.

The first company to create a platform that fulfills this promise is Inflow. We sat down with Alexander Yoseph, co-founder and CEO of 

, to talk about how their platform is poised to empower artists and fans alike, their story, and how they are doing so far.

Alexander first envisioned Inflow as a platform that allowed musicians, athletes, and content creators to launch their own social tokens and start monetizing their communities.

“As fans, we’re the biggest economic producers in the music industry, but we actually get no type of reward for being a fan, and so crypto lets us do that. A lot of the social token platforms are missing the social aspect, and so that’s what we wanted to bring – a way for you to interact with your favorite creator in our setting, on our platform.”

Inflow enables artists to mint tokens that give fans “access to their livestreams – thanks to Livepeer Studio – their music videos, their songs, their vlogs, interviews, or any type of studio sessions. The first kind of utility that we’re going to give is access to content and experiences.”

He rendered this vision in a white paper he wrote in 2019, and incorporated the company a year later. Afterward, he got into the 

, an accelerator for early-stage blockchain and web3 startups backed by 

“That really kicked off our journey and solidified us as a key player in the space,” said Alexander.

An experiential music platform for true music fans

 to create tokens that their fans can use to access:

Special events only accessible by token holders

Inflow also allows artists to create DAOs that give fans the power to vote on matters like what artists they should collaborate with.

Not only can artists reward fans for their support, but they can also create two new revenue streams free of intermediaries:

A 3% fee every time someone buys or sells their token

The sale of NFTs or royalties from their ownership

For Alexander, delivering unique experiences to token holders came down to video: “When we talk about experiences, video is the closest thing you can get to experiencing somebody, whether it be on a livestream, experiencing music videos or behind-the-scenes footage, or a studio session.”

During his time in Tachyon Accelerator, Alexander started to look for a web3 provider that enabled video streaming, particularly for live content like concerts and shows.

Alexander and Richard’s first decision was to use Amazon S3, but they soon realized its popularity wasn’t worth its high costs. They tried token gating YouTube and Vimeo videos, but that didn’t work for their users either.

As they scraped for a better solution, Alexander heard one of the founders of 

, a video NFT platform, praise Livepeer. That was followed by a second referral by someone from 

, an NFT-powered social platform. For the founders, it was crucial to leverage a web3-native tool. “Since we are progressively decentralizing, Livepeer just made sense,” Alexander explained.

Inflow’s web3 stack is made up of “whatever tools that makes us as autonomous and decentralized as possible, but then also, that it is not that hard to implement. I think it’s a mixture of ease of implementation and, “does it align with our core mission of being hands-off?”. We want to exist in the community and be really a tool that is run by the people.”

How Livepeer Studio helped Inflow deliver a unique fan experience

Richard, the CTO, was originally doubtful about trying Livepeer Studio because “he didn’t know what to build—we’re building so many things and he didn’t know how much time this would take.”

However, this feeling soon changed when Richard found that “just from a development standpoint, it’s been really easy to use. He said it works perfectly, and now we’re just getting the video-on-demand stuff ready to go.”

Alexander and Richard found Livepeer Studio ideal for livestreaming, which plays a major part in its value proposition.

“Being able to have this one-on-one conversation, or being able to have this intimate experience with them is very important. Attaching a value to that and basically being rewarded in experience with these tokens and with these livestreams—that’s the first thing that Livepeer Studio is going to be helping us with.”

A second crucial way they are using Livepeer Studio is for on-demand video and token-gating exclusive content. “Music and videos are going to be the core content that’s on our platforms,“ said Alexander. “Token-gating is important as well, too—being able to token-gate, not only with our technology but with the help of your technology.”

The fact that the Livepeer Studio team worked shoulder-to-shoulder with the founders was the final point that convinced them. “We need a team that can hop on calls with us and that’s really important for us,” explained Alexander.

Thanks to Livepeer Studio, the founders are ready to grow while keeping true to Alexander’s original vision. As he put it, “The reason why I started Inflow is because it’s a mixture of two of my passions, music and crypto – music and economics, really. I think creating an option where people could work on their passions is the biggest thing crypto could have –financial freedom for the everyday person.”

Interested in learning more about Livepeer Studio? Join the community on 

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

Web3 offers a unique opportunity for musicians to connect, livestream events, and reward their fans. The first company to create a platform that fulfills this promise is Inflow. We sat down with Alexander Yoseph, co-founder and CEO of Inflow, about how their platform is poised to empower artists and fans alike.

How Inflow Created the First Music Platform for the Web3 Economy