- centralized structure for video content upload (storage)
- token to pay to creators which would result in their upvote
- voting & payment to be decentralized though a certain % from the payment would go to the centralized entity to keep the storage/server running
- other than that all is to be permissionless
1 Like
Decentralized Video Sharing Platform
Problem: Current system is decentralized but it takes lot of space and need to delete old videos from peers. Which is not ideal for content creator as content is being deleted. At same time we donāt want central server to host all the content which can result in central control.
Other issue is current internet infrastructure and the fast speed is not available everywhere
Solution:
We need to admit that not all the peers will have very powerful hardware, bandwidth and storage. So we need a some sort of compromise where content metadata, user info, monetization need to be in blockchain and the content host on some powerful nodes. So it will be a hierarchical system where some nodes are more powerful than others and serve storage and distribution function of the content. So it needs to be a system where some node are more powerful with better hardware, bandwidth, storage etc. These nodes need to be geographically distributed to cater for all the consumers around the globe. Content-creator can create a transaction which has the video content and upload it the blockchain, blockchain will store content metadata and user info but storage of the content happens on the powerful nodes. Once content is viewed and paid by users and sponsors then this monetization info can also be stored in blockchain. Removal of the inappropriate content from the powerful nodes can happen by consensus from participating nodes and the viewers by voting which automatically activated via a front-end complaint mechanism.
2 Likes
We can have a decentralize network with a centralize entity for storing the content of the video like SIA coin or Storj coin. the add value of this network is that the data hashed and distributed so no one can delete it.
We can also decentralize the numbers and identity of the followers on a public blockchain
The revenue of the Youtubers can come from the advertising related in every video using a tokenization of the expense between publishers and Youtubers
1 Like
Everything can be decentralized except for video playback/content delivery, due to performance.
- Decentralized web front UI (ie. SUB)
- Decentralized user/creator profiles
- Decentralized tokenization of payment - both with ads and without ads (pay to view/donations) (ie. BAT))
- Decentralized content (video) ācoldā storage - so content canāt be deleted (STORJ, or even bit torrent)
- Centralized caching and content delivery (CDNs ie. Akamai, etc.)
- the requested video is pulled from the decentralized slow storage, cached into the CDN and then delivered to the end user
I think a more modular approach is the best. I donāt think one blockchain solves this, rather a collaboration of multiple projects, solving each of the requirements listed above. Each can incentivize their own continued development and innovation.
3 Likes
A decentralized YouTube should guarantee that all the views which are in the end what transforms into income, that information is public and transparent. This would require that the identities of the users of the platform, both content creators and viewers, should be also part of this decentralized information data set along with the metadata of the video. In this way the owner of a video can tally the views from any user and get compensated accordingly while tracking possible copies of his content.
The video itself and other big files, should not be part of this as that wonāt account for compensation. That could be managed in a centralized manner and could be more efficient as streaming is better handled by dedicated servers.
1 Like
Please help me understand how a food product (or another homogeneous item) utilizes Blockchain to trace from source to final product.
I can understand how Blockchain can be used with an identifiable product like a diamond or an electronic device. However, I am challenged with a food product.
If I go into the grocery store, how can I track an orange (for example)? What differentiates one orange from another?
I am trying to understand this as a ProjectManager/BusinessAnalyst with a technical (not current) background.
Thanks for your help
Hello Filip & Fellow Classmates,
I have to be honest and say that I was moving full throttle on this course until I ran into this assignment. This is due to the fact although I use YT daily, I have never posted any content and therefore never thought about monetization from advertisements for example.
Without further research into YT I donāt think I would have anything valid to contribute at this time.
Rather, I decided to read through everyoneās posts to get a better understanding of the components involved that makes up a video channel.
I have two comments. Firstly, in my opinion that I do not see how a video platform could possibly be totally decentralized due to large file sizes. I would not want my videos deleted as Filip mentioned in his prior lesson content regarding the decentralized service that is available, so at this current point in time until some Blockchain Brainiac comes to the rescue with a new solution, this would have to be centralized.
My second and last comment are that of course anything regarding monetization needs, and should be, transparent.
All of your comments were well thought through and I gained a lot of insight. Thank you for posting.
Also, thank you Filip for having our content from other classmates available and not locked so we can review each otherās thoughts and ideas. This in my view opens our minds to concepts we may have not even thought of and therefore put different perspectives on a topic and its components.
8 Likes
Thank you for sharing 
Good feedback.
Iām a lot like Rorey, above, I too view YouTube daily and even tip content creators with BAT through my Brave browser. Yet I have never posted content and really have no idea of the monetization process that the content creators have to go through to monetize their offerings.
Being a former IT guy, in my younger years, itās seems perfectly logical for performance to want to say that the best solution would to decentral the UI, identity, search engine and monetization component while using a centralized storage for the videos due to the weight of the videos on the blockchain. I agree with my fellow students who proposed putting the metadata on the blockchain that links to the video could better protect the content on a centralized server from being deleted by someone other than the content creator. Having redundant content servers in globally different locations would provide increased protection as well.
While that all sounds logical and maybe the most efficient option, the nagging question remains, is the content truly protected if it is not decentralized?
1 Like
Posting this message to fulfill the āblockchain powered youtubeā assignment.
Having analyzed the ideas behind the youtube service as is, Iāve discovered the following roles
- Viewer - consumes the content. Wants as much free content as possible.
- Author - the content creator. Some want to share their ideas for free. Others goal is to get paid.
- Hosting - an organisation (or maybe a mesh of individuals like IPFS) to store the video content.
- Analytics - an organisation who collects the data about likes, views, etc.
- Advertiser - an organization who wants to sell goods or promote some ideas to the viewers.
In case of youtube, google makes hosting and analytics, sells the data to advertisers and pays the authors. The viewers pay with their personal data. So google clearly has the power here, as it can shutdown the service any time, also it controls pretty much all the aspects of the system such as ranks, monetization algorithms, etc. The system is not transparent and can be modified by google without any care about the authors and viewers.
Blockchain can help making the payments explicit and perform them in the trusted manner. The viewers can be awarded with some tokens for viewing the ads and for sharing their personal data. These tokens can be spent on getting access to the video and then get paid to both the author and the hosting provider (the split can happen either automatically or be performed explicitly by the user). Hosting providers might get paid by authors or by advertisers (with either the same token or a different one). The advertisers would get the profit from the āreal worldā deals and hence would be the main source of bringing money into the ecosystem.
P.S. Sorry if the essay is too poorly structured but itās the best piece I can come up with so far. Not sure if I were supposed to break the problem into smaller and more specific details.
2 Likes
I see several major users of the video platformā¦creators, advertisers, management and viewers. I suggest creators be able to store their content on a blockchain but retain control of their content (i.e.could not be deleted or modified except by them). They should pay a fee to management based on file size, number of views, etc. This could be done with existing cryptocurrencies without the need to create a separate blockchain since the fee would be a direct payment only to management. Vlewers would only be able to view the videos, but have a payment option for no advertising. The default condition would be with no viewer fee (but including advertising). The rules for this should be part of a smart contract on blockchain. Payment to creators would be according to a formula in the contract. Likewise, advertisers would also be governed by a smart contract according to a formula based on number of viewers, etc.
Iām having a hard time understanding why T-Mobile needs a blockchain for the Next Identity Platform and would love to hear others thoughts on this. I went to another more recent article to wrap my head around what they are actually doing. It looks like it is with regard to a āuser recordā (i.e. a person who uses their services for cell phone use), and said user may have access to different service levels, add-ons, downgrades, and upgrades to service, all of which could change over the life-cycle of their service. IF, Iām understanding their thesis correctly.
From the recent article about Next Identity:
In a company with millions of users with differing levels of service, permission management is a considerable bottleneck. Regulations around user security and privacy add a further layer of complexity to such a system.
Hereās why I question the necessity for a blockchain:
When we look at the decision tree from a prior lesson in this course, Iām not seeing the use case pan out.
āDoes more than one entity write transactions?ā We can assume yes because itās a massive company with retail locations and online agents. Sure.
āDo writers trust each other?ā - T-Mobile was assuming a No which led them to the next decision which is:
āDo transactions interact with each other?ā Which they do as there would be a progression of services turned on and off as a result of changes made to the user record. ā So I get that but disagree with the prior decision which implemented a blockchain based on non-trust because a SQL Server database has the ability to track all records by *last modification timestamp and *user thus providing audit functionality. We can look at the record and see when things happened, and who did it in a heartbeat with a query of the database which then makes this a management issue, not a technology issue.
Why would we need the complexity, cost, and slower speed of a blockchain from a design standpoint if a SQL database would work? If the Hyperledger system does, in fact, reduce complexity and increase efficiency, I guess that would be interesting, but the decision tree does not have that per se, as a question. SQL Server databases are super fast and efficient if designed well.
The first article that the lesson references does say that āSmart contracts handle the approval and provisioning of permissionsā, so thatās interesting - but not sure if a SQL stored procedure and/or set of triggers couldnāt handle that type of logic.
Would like to get others thoughts on this. Is T-Mobile sprinkling magical blockchain dust on a problem?
Thanks in advance for any insight.
3 Likes
Regards to the video assignment.
First question. Do we need a blockchain based on the pain point Filip outlined?
In current operating video sharing platforms, the ones that work well are centralized entities and they have the ability to (and do) take accounts away based on their pre-determined set of rules or morality. Private companies can mostly do as they will as long as they are not breaking laws. Because of this, we would want a blockchain based on this lack of trust. A permissionless blockchain system for administering accounts would be step one.
Without understanding software architecture on a granular level, I can only make a guess of having the public blockchain interoperate with a hash or reference of some kind to the video content that lives in a type of NoSql database.
The design on this all is a big topic. Iām not sure how monetization would take place, Iāve heard Steemit has issues with people gaming the system by creating multiple accounts. Using a token of some kind for monetization would be a possibility.
Also, the user creating lists and permissions for public/private/link-based viewing would all have to be considered. I would think those operations would take place outside the public blockchain in a SQL-type environment.
And then thereās the whole editing platform. How would all that interact?
Very big and interesting design issues within these new technologies emerging!
2 Likes
Fantastic post and great points there. I agree that in many instances the implementation of blockchain can be questioned along the lines you did here. Iām not exactly sure who the different writers are either. The problems of doing these types of analysis are in my opinion two.
First, the insight into these solutions are very minimal. All we know about their system is what we can read from press documents and so on. That makes it very difficult to know if it even is a legit blockchain system.
Two, itās also very difficult to see how huge corporations like T-mobile, with huge amount of resources and IT professionals would invest 10X the amount of capital required by going with blockchain if there is no increase in efficiency. I can understand small startups that want to raise money etc. But if they could get the same efficiency for 1/10 of the cost by going with an SQL database, why would they spend this kind of money on a blockchain system. This really bothers me, because I canāt really answer this question.
Those are my two cents here.
4 Likes
thanks for your response and right, I see both your points. It is hard to know unless youāre actually on the project. With regard to the 10X in capital required, I agree that is a lot of money and unlikely that a corp would spend it without a clear roi but I have worked in a couple Fortune 500 environments and have seen a lot of money wasted on some politically motivated and/or vanity projects. But I get you there.
It was a really good exercise to think through all that, so thank you.
1 Like
With video content in general the storage of such content is a major issue. Putting video content on the Blockchain sounds like something to be avoided which would most probably bog down the efficiency and usability of the Blockchain. As this decentralized service became more popular it would not be scalable if all video content was stored on the Blockchain. As it is clear to see in the vast majority of the Bitcoin developers mentality, putting information which is outside the scope of finance and UTXO on the Blockchain is unwanted. Keeping a Blockchain from getting bloated has been their strategy and in my opinion it has seemed to work.
I can see a place for an incentive program to be implemented on the Blockchain which rewards content creators with some native token for their efforts by their followers. This may really be more of a replacement for the Patreon side of content creators business model though, and not so much YouTubeās side of things.
1 Like
Hyperledger could be used for identity management, then starting from 3 channels: contentproviders, contentconsumers, content, up to a multitude of channels: contentfree, contentwithpub, contentpremium.
providers would basically manage access to their premium, also would accetp or not moneytization througth interrupted smallsized pub content of other contentproviders. contentconsumers could pay to optin to premium or only access contentfree or contentwithpub, while the ones paid premium could optout from either contentwithpub and/or contentfree. The content would be just hash pointers to outside data and the real stream/feed itself could be used from anywhere in the world, NoSQL/mongoDB even from public or private youtube/steemit/ipfs/aws/azure whatever. The value transfer also would be hash symbolic and could be managed using any current or new valued digital currency BTC/LTC/DASH/Doge/Utrust/Credits/Etn ā¦/Uphold/Coinbase/Luno ā¦/Fiat/Visa/PayPal whatever works good.
TLDR: hyperledger for ācontent_rewardsā platform business logic, video content stored in any NoSQL DB, value transfer API from anyone Digital trusted Crypto/Exchange/Fiat payment processor API.
2 Likes
But ācheapā Marketing Hype about Blockchain usage already, also such introduction (not so much money relevant) project in the blockchain (state-of-the-art) technologies would look a great oportunity to learn from this experience and see its potencial adopted or leaved alone.
3 Likes
Hi @bridgdora ,
My thoughts exactly. At my employer I am somehow kinda known as a BC guy and people talk ideas and I had my own B.C. decision tree in my head when reading this. Of course Eleniās blogpost really nailed it succinctly. (Thank You for the quality content @filip).
To answer you, I think this is a sandbox and testing ground for something they will turn into a product or service in future.
But completely agree with you, SQL DB would do and to confirm your last point - yes SQL procedure or any workflow system (SAP/Websphere/Maximo/ServiceNow/Jira) could address approval processes the same as Smart contracts do. (Of course identity is not a problem as all employees surely have SSL IDs.)
1 Like
Hi @filip @bridgdora,
Same thoughts. Aside of a promo / showcase BC implementation like @cme says and I am pretty sure there is a motivation to the future. SW companies often home-grow, test on internal processes then go-to-market with it as a product. T-Mobile could use this as an eCommerce engine for their business customers to order/subscribe to T-Mobile services/software/licenses. Aaand when time comes to charge them, thatās when the private-BC traits of immutability, append-only, transparency mix VS confidentiality, encryption, all come in handy.
One time large investment, but ongoing revenue-protection and edge over competition.
And most importantly provenance where one license/service will travel between users.
It would nicely fit with trusted nodes groups also since there are business partners, SW re-sellers, the business clients could be nodes too. It is their cost to watch and transparency to secure in the end.
If anyone would like to join me in making such a blockchain I would be very happy 
As to the case - ok, I am speculating only but something along these lines Iād expect to be the motive of a telekom/SW company.
Let me know your thoughts
1 Like