BlockStream

Demo

About

The problem it solves It solves the problem of censorship and weaponization of platforms in video streaming. In the recent months we have seen how Big Tech have been weaponized which inspired me to build this to preserve free speech. Two important phenomenon are evident. One, who made the big tech our media watchdog? Second, YouTube cannot be a platform and act as an editor and a censor all at the same time. That's called rigging the game. Two phenomena are very visible. One is the weaponisation of the internet, of which we were aware in some sense as we have seen user harm etc in the past. The second is what I call the phenomenon of the splinter-net. The internet is now increasingly being splintered driven by the power of some western countries. Regulations and rules were never considered since the internet was never intended to be used for anything other than the collective benefit. But currently, the perception of the internet has shifted from being solely for the public benefit to also including user damage. These platforms have become so big, the power of these platforms and therefore the power that they represent on the internet is so dominant, that in the event of a conflict between two sovereigns, these platforms are playing roles and therefore are being weaponised. While the pipelines may be diverse and uncontrollable, the platforms are now regulating internet access in a variety of harmful ways. Hence a decentalized video streaming platform like BlockStream is a necessity going forward in these uncertain times. Building this in the Ethereals hackathon is only the beginning and I want to continue to build this into a full featured platform with support of the community for preservation of free speech.

How it's made

Challenges we ran into There were multiple challenges that I faced. I faced problem with integrating it with LivePeer. Writing the smart contract was also a challenge but I overcomed it.