DLive - Bounty Survey for All Readers. Welcome for Tech Teasers.
First off, we truly appreciate all of your support and apologize for not being able to reply to everyone’s comments. On the other hand, we’re excited about the enthusiastic interest you’ve expressed and, as we write, we’re highly engaged with your queries regarding the product features and technical implementations. Therefore, we will use this post to answer some of the more common questions, explain features that will be included in the first beta version of DLive, and share our current technical implementation progress. We’re also offering a Great Ideas Challenge with SBD as the prize, so make sure you read all the way through.
If you don’t know what DLive is, here is the introduction link.
[https://steemit.com/dlive/@dlive/dlive-the-first-decentralized-live-streaming-platform-on-steem]
UI Design
Style Guide
Prototype
1. Homepage--Login--Go Live
2. Homepage--Content Page--Theater Mode--Donation--Follow
Features & Tech Stack
Login
Generally, you log into Steem-based apps with your posting keys. In addition, to save you from relogging, your posting keys and usernames are somehow saved by those Steem-based apps. At the beginning of the project, to accelerate development speed, we considered storing postings keys locally with secure and encrypted cookies or localstorage in browsers, as some other Steem-based apps are doing. However, your security is always our top priority. We want to ensure you that DLive provides a robust and secure environment for live streaming broadcasters and viewers without putting your security at risk.
Thus, instead of asking you to trust DLive, we follow the advice from Steemit Corp and use SteemConnect to manage your logins. SteemConnect is a trusted 3rd party, ran officially by SteemIt Corp, allowing you to manage your logins to steem-based apps. With SteemConnect, we do not have any access to any privates keys or password. We only use an access token provided by SteemConnect to verify you and perform posting actions on your behalf.
Voting
The voting system on DLive will be the same as it is on Steemit. you will be able to upvote and downvote contents including live streaming. Downvote will be presented as “Report” on DLive.
Donations
You will be able to show their appreciation to broadcasters by transferring STEEM or SBD. Normally you’ll need to enter your active key before accessing your wallet and on dapps, that might give away your active key to malicious developers. Thus, we use SteemConnect v2 without revealing your active key or password, and you could sign a link for the donation.
Sync with Steemit.com
All contents on DLive are synchronized with Steem blockchain; therefore, when you post or repost a content on DLive, it also posts the content on your accounts on Steemit.com or busy.org. As the content is broadcasted on Steem blockchain, your content could gain tractions from other Steem-base platforms such as steemit.com. For example, non-DLive users could see and join the interactions during a live streaming just on steemit.com through the corresponding post.
Chatroom
You could express freely while watching a live streaming broadcast by posting in its chatroom. Messages in the chat windows during live streaming is counted as comments for this live streaming. When a user enter the chatroom, recent messages will be displayed to the user. Chat history will synchronize to Steem blockchain and could be seen on other Steem-based websites or apps as comments.
Live Streaming Service
Decentralized live streaming technology has been on our radar for a while. Livepeer just released their testnet, and IPFS with libp2p could potentially support live streaming. However, none of them are production-ready as of today. Therefore, DLive will launch with Wowza live streaming service and gradually move towards p2p live streaming tech as they mature. Wowza is the leader of live streaming service and has been serving well-known applications like Periscope.
DLive supports most RTMP encoders for live streaming and we recommend using Open Broadcast Software, which is a free and open source software running on Windows, macOS and Linux. Encoders of different format and protocols will be supported in the future. If you have a preference on encoders, please use the survey at the bottom of this article to let us know! We will accommodate your needs as soon as possible.
Live Streams Playback Storage
All your live streams will be stored on Wowza Cloud for 24 hours and will be deleted if you decide not to store them. During this 24 hour period, you can download them as a backup and then upload to DLive for others to rewatch your live streaming. If others like it, you get rewarded again!
However, we have to find a way to store these live streaming playbacks and IPFS is a no-brainer. IPFS is a file system protocol enabling decentralized file storage; however, it comes with a cost. Someone has to seed the videos otherwise they may be lost by IPFS recycle policy.
We rented a web server which runs IPFS daemon nonstop to pin all the videos in case videos go out of fashion and get recycled. Thus all videos will be uploaded to this IPFS node and then broadcasted on the IPFS network.
To maintain this IPFS node dedication to maintaining storage of live streams playback, each DLive user is guaranteed to use at least 1 Gb in storage. Additional space is proportional to the STEEM POWER a user holds. Each user is given 10 Mb for each STEEM Power. Each video is limited to 1 Gb in size. Each user can upload up to 20 videos each week. We may revise these numbers if needed. To prevent intentional abuse, we might have limitations on users with very low reputation.
To seed the videos, we use cloud servers for video storage, currently using Microsoft Azure. In terms of implementation, we use JS-IPFS on Node.js to run IPFS daemon. Right now, the price for seeding the video files is roughly $0.041/Gb/Month. In the future, we may build our dedicated storage servers with an enterprise network to seed the videos. To further utilize the storage more efficiently, we will have a backend program to detect and remove duplicate files on our server. We appreciate your help if you want to seed DLive videos with IPFS to improve our streaming performance.
Bounty Survey
Now that you’ve got the technicals down, we would like to know what you want to see. Since we received so much feedback from our last post, we decided to put a small bounty survey for “Great Idea” contributors. Fifty percent of the funds raised from this article will be given out as a prize, and the rest of the fund, as is customary, will be for DLive developing. You can participate by following the instructions below.
Here are the rules:
- Resteem this article
- Complete the SURVEY fully with no fake answers
- Any account with reputation level less than 30 is not allowed to attend.
Prize:
Following the tradition of Steem, every qualified participants will be rewarded. Eighty percent of the prize will be given to those who win the lottery of great ideas, and Twenty percent will be distributed evenly to every other participant.
So, for example, consider this scenario:
- If this post earns $1,000 in total, $500 will go to Great Ideas contributors
- We will draw the names of 3 people to split $400 and the rest, $100, will be distributed evenly to the remainder of the participants.
Survey URL:
https://goo.gl/forms/LwTWskcG8j9WARKu2
Participants can see their status in the following link:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vQNCo63_kFdAgkNNLqEJrAh2sq_UYVxSlFhaQaPSQvbe9HW8l1JtKkFd8v6gExcA9gJqyeckGRSdXrh/pubhtml?gid=679556266&single=true
Hi All, as for today the rewarding pool is around $137. The draw will be starting in 24 hours.
You can check your status through this link:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vQNCo63_kFdAgkNNLqEJrAh2sq_UYVxSlFhaQaPSQvbe9HW8l1JtKkFd8v6gExcA9gJqyeckGRSdXrh/pubhtml?gid=679556266&single=true
Please remember to resteem the post for qualifying the bounty. Thanks!
Ok, interesting idea. When will it be available?
Thanks for following us! As you can tell, it would be available soooooon, and we are trying to polish the prototype as much as we can before launch. We have a bounty survey, you are welcome to participate and will have some STEEM as reward! Your feedback will be great for our development! Thanks!
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We will have the lottery for our survey participants soon! The rewarding pool now is $127! We would like to have more feedbacks.
Thanks
First DTube now DLive, what about Dhub?!
D.Tube will be doing something in the DHub space. They mentioned that in a previous post on Steemit btw @benjm
i messed them up, thought they were same
Somethings just shouldn't be decentralized my friend.
Wrong. Everything should be decentralized.
Nice! Another site for me to binge watch random cat videos.
Lol, bring back piano cat!!!
hahaha, you can also share cat videos! Let us know if you would like to be our first group of broadcasters! Help us to send out the message and fill out our survey, we will have a lottery soon!
Very exciting stuff. Do you have a time frame for your development?
I saw in the video how you made a donation and a pop-up appeared in the chat and then faded-out without further notification. It can be easy to miss that for the streamer so it would be great if donations would be highlighted somewhere. They are a big thing for streamers. it should bve a prominent place and stick out a little bit.
I am working on a new animated puppet for life-streaming with @kayrex. We will have a dwarf miner with a crypto show. I hope to run it on DLive soon.
Yeah great suggestion guy.
I was thinking something similar for comments with a hefty donation attached.
A banner area above the video would work. Or even over the video like live.me does it.
So that a the user donating receives a sense of reward and of engagement.
Interaction elements are a must with streaming.
Nice art there! They look great! Let us know if you would like to be our first group of beta users/broadcasters! It would be great if you can resteem this article and participate our content survey. We will have a lottery for participants soon!
@dlive Just filled up the survey, gave ya'll a crucial tip to attract gaming streamers from Twitch (which I believe to be the best gaming streaming platform currently)
Nonetheless, I was taken aback when the survey asked about my preferences regarding cryptocurrencies.. even though I did not select cryptocurrency in the question before.. Perhaps not everyone on Steemit is into cryptocurrency? :P
Yep you are right, the google form is not allowing us to do conditional based on checkbox. Good luck on the bounty survey! we will have the lottery soooon!
One of the major major problems with twitch is the chatbox design. Anyone who has seen even a semi full chat room knows how useless thoes chat boxes become as text flys by faster than the speed of light. My solution would be to maybe make a tab style chatbox that many modern MMORPGS have adopted so people can have more control over what or who they want to hear from. Some kinda vip system.
Looking forward to this, cheers.
Exactly my point too, I'm not sure if it's good that they are actually comments, maybe there should be a time delay so people can upvote comments. Maybe Machine Learning can classify comments and group them together.
This could end up similarly to demonetization on YouTube where powerful Whales can and do downvote controversial subjects. But this has rather to do how Steem works and would require a hardfork. I think bad stuff should get downvotes from a lot of people instead of a few powerful, that would be much more indicative of real abuse.
Production ready
You guys are learning from Dtube! I'll be sure to fill in the survey!
Like your comment!
Kind of like Discord?
Thanks for the update. It looks to be developing well.
I will definitely resteem and try my luck in the survey.
One suggestion I'll put here is that you could actually offer storage as a premium. Since you are a streaming service. You aren't exactly obligated to hold that data. For a small fee you can cover costs and even create a revenue stream for further development.
Even a small fee to migrate the data for the user would be acceptable.
Humans like less hassle, so offering the options would be beneficial to many who don't want to be actively moving that data.
Very impressed with the progress.
Looking forward to beta and beyond.
I would think cross project integration with dtube would be the best solution. But all these service to open up publicly accessible APIs. Securing and maintaining these endpoints may be annoying.
Yeah I thought of that too but it's obvious that teams have their projects and keep it that way.
In an ideal world steemit would be the main stop and these extras all integrated.
Maybe in the future that will be a thing.
You mention donations will be through sending steem/sbd. Will voting the stream directly also be possible? that'd be great
Voting is also rewardable. It will follow the same logic of Steem.
That is awesome!