efdevcon/tv is a repository for an open-source live-streaming and playback solution. It was used to power streameth.tv which was used during recent gatherings in Amsterdam.
Streameth used API infrastructure hosted and provided by Livepeer Video Services, which are operated by Livepeer Inc., a private company. These services are based on Livepeer Open Source, which is “Open video infrastructure for an open web.”
This DIP is to adapt efdevcon/tv so that livestreaming for Devcon can use self-hosted video infrastructure, instead of needing to rely on a private company to operate the infrastructure on their behalf.
This would remove any deplatforming risk associated with using centralised media providers, and would allow Devcon to stand on its own for it’s end-to-end media distribution solution.
I definitely think we should make streameth provider agnostic. Currently the application is only using the livepeer API for status checks on each livestream, so it should be quite simple to remove the dependency on livepeer API and build our own custom logic to check on a livestream status.
I do not think we should host own our infrastructure with catalyst for the following reason:
Even if we host our own catalist node, we would still need to push video segments out to a CDN to make the live streams highly available. I dont think that there is a reliable decentralized CDN service that we could use right now.
@chrishobcroft maybe you know of a solution that we could use to replace centralized CDNs that matches the required scalability of devcon.
