globalframes - web3 powered video

Introduction

Video is the most critical form of media. As a multisensory medium, it conveys authenticity and has a deep emotional impact. It is a powerful way to broadcast information and communicate online. Technological advancements continuously make it easier to produce higher quality video content. And the internet should in theory democratize publishing video information.

Youtube is by far the biggest online video service. Although YouTube offers a very convenient service, its monopoly is troublesome. Many crypto projects have been banned from YouTube, and YouTube requires legal entities to register and accept only traditional payment systems - very inconvenient i.e. for DAOs that want to stay crypto-native.

GlobalFrames’ success factor

Many projects have attempted to become the “web3 YouTube” - with very limited success. These projects focused on the end users, the viewers and had no viable business model. Globalframes on the other hand focuses on the content creators and introduces a sustainable financial model.

The offering

GlobalFrames offers both Video on Demand (VOD) and Streaming via LivePeer via a focussed and convenient UI. LivePeer also takes care of storage and distribution (CDN). The video files are also stored on the IPFS network.

Authentication via WalletConnect replaces the traditional account creation with a convenient sign in.

Innovations

GlobalFrames is the first crypto native platform that allows organizations to have a convenient UI to use VOD and Streaming. The streaming payments are ideal for flexible subscriptions. Because of the way globalframes is built, the content creators retain full control of their video material.

Bootstrap model

We choose our “beachhead market” to be the DAO space. DAO’s manage funds and can easily spend it. Our crypto-native approach towards subscription (money streaming), video transcoding and storage is very much aligned with the requirements and values of a DAO. Our offering prevents deplatforming and can provide a more consistent service to DAO’s than any centralized offering. After onboarding our first DAO’s and learning from their experiences, we can target content producers that face similar problems of deplatforming and according to initial inquiry, are open to our approach and state that they would like to test out our solution.

Team

Globalframes is the brainchild of Kay (@geleeroyale), as he experienced challenges in his long work streaming video for Giveth DAO. Stefaan Ponnet has been in the Ethereum ecosystem since 2015 and has kickstarted various projects in the space like AVADO and Swarm City. Hendrik completed the team with his academic and practical experience in hardware and software design, and video coding.

One more thing: Token gated access

As a stretch goal - we introduce the concept of premium content through a token-gates access for videos. Video content can be made available to wallets that own certain NFT’s or have a balance of selected tokens (ex. DAO governance tokens). This allows a DAO or content producer to sell access to their content through their own NFT’s and experiment with novel monetization models that previously were impossible.

Acknowledgements

We like to thank the awesome help and mentoring we had from the LivePeer and SuperFluid teams. Their feedback was paramount for this amazing hackathon. The excellent organization, venue and catering also help the team to keep hacking until the deadline.

Globalframes is built with following technologies:

• LivePeer provides the perfect infrastructure for the globalframes project. VOD and streaming via a convenient API. The few features we missed (transcoding for VOD and thumbnailing) will be added soon. We solved this for now, with FFmpeg.

• We use SuperFluid to handle payments for subscriptions. We also plan to use SuperFluid for paying LivePeer and IPFS pinning. The graph is used to query the ‘subscription’ status of logged in users.

WalletConnect is used for signing in.

• IPFS for decentralized storage

• The Client UI is written in React. Multiple pages were created that support our content creator’s workflow. The UI is supported by a Node.js REST server (restify) that combines everything together.

The code is built with Yarn and npm.