Livepeer Incorporated! (and realtime AI)

Written by Doug Petkanics, Co-founder and CEO at Livepeer Inc

The past 18 months have been an energizing time to be in the Livepeer Ecosystem. An onchain treasury was introduced to fund public goods via community governance, the community has coalesced around Livepeer’s opportunity to be the leading infrastructure for realtime AI video, and fees and usage of the network have been steadily increasing due to this focus. The Livepeer Foundation has recently launched to steward the 10+ entities in the ecosystem that are core contributors to the project, and is unlocking even more funding around the opportunities recommended in the project’s strategic pillars.

With so much core development, marketing, and growth driven by the ecosystem at large, the company that I co-founded and operate, Livepeer Incorporated, has had the opportunity to shift its focus to what we deem to be the highest priority area of the project where we feel uniquely suited to make an outsized impact: executing a high conviction go to market motion in an attempt to dramatically grow demand on the Livepeer network. We, like many in the ecosystem, are fully bought in to the realtime AI video vision laid out in Livepeer Cascade, and are solely focused on productization to find product market fit for the Livepeer network as the leading infrastructure in the coming world of live video AI. Here is a bit about what Livepeer Inc is focused on, and almost equally as importantly, what we are not focused on in the coming 12 months.

Product Market Fit for Realtime AI Video 

As mentioned, the number one priority is to prove that the Livepeer network has product market fit as an infrastructure that runs the latest and greatest in realtime AI video workflows for developers. To do this, we’ll focus on three core things:

1. Contribute to core network development to ensure Livepeer is an infrastructure that can run realtime AI video workflows.
2. Build the developer APIs to run these workflows that developers use to build them into applications. This is a natural extension of Livepeer Studio. 
3. Cultivate the leading realtime AI video community. Researchers, builders, and creators interested in this coming category need a home. They will provide the moat that ensures that an open, community led infrastructure will always be more responsive, cost effective, and full featured than centralized alternatives.

We’re going to provide the full stack product, engineering, community, and go to market motion to validate product market fit for this opportunity. This will drive significant fees and growth into the Livepeer network. We’re aligned as large LPT token holders and want the network to succeed - which represents a far bigger opportunity for Livepeer Inc than any revenue related opportunity via SaaS services in the short term. Let’s grow those network fees!

What Livepeer Inc is Not Focused On

While there are many potential products and go to markets that can be executed upon under an ambitious vision of being the world’s open video infrastructure, a single company is more likely to succeed by focusing on only one opportunity at a time. Many alternative demand generating bets will be better served by other self-motivated actors in the ecosystem - especially as the open source software around Livepeer, and the broader ecosystem has matured to the point of providing reliable access points for different categories of use cases.Regarding Livepeer Inc’s learnings on some of these categories:

• Transcoding alone has been proven out technically and economically, however the market hasn’t accepted the standalone infrastructure without significant productization, support, SLAs, and enterprise services around it.
• Similarly, when bundled with end to end streaming, the offering isn’t significantly differentiated in a crowded and consolidating market. 
• Livepeer Studio will continue to support existing users at the enterprise level that pay for these surrounding services, while passing the transcoding jobs through to the Livepeer network, but due to the long sales cycle and slow growth, it will not be actively competing to grow this source of demand. 
• The ecosystem can support aspiring users of transcoding and streaming via projects like Streamplace, the Frameworks SPE, and their supporting teams. One of the core pillars of the Livepeer Foundation’s GTM recommendations is to tackle being the open video infrastructure for web3 social and decentralized streaming, so the ecosystem will prioritize support. This includes aspiring web3-centric streaming users, who culturally align with the values of the project community, but to date have not shown significant growth nor driven significant fees to the network. There’s an opportunity for these projects to crack this nut and help these users grow, if they deem it to be worth the effort!
• There are also additional bets that the ecosystem is interested in around the realtime AI mission. These are laid out by the Livepeer Foundation’s GTM Strategy post. Visual avatars for live AI agents is one example. Realtime video analysis and understanding are others. These areas do overlap with the broad theme that Livepeer Inc is focused on - running realtime AI models on live video on the Livepeer network. However as Inc pursues creative AI use cases initially to inspire the broader world in what’s possible, we welcome others in the ecosystem building commercial entities to go after these opportunities. And we will certainly collaborate. If the ecosystem efforts make technical progress, but stop short of commercializing and going to market, these are areas for collaboration with Inc to consider productizing for commercial purposes. 

A Simplified View: Foundation and Inc

While the above contains a lot of details about realtime AI and specific demand generating bets on the Livepeer network, there’s a simplified view:

• The Livepeer Foundation will steward the Livepeer community, project marketing, and public goods funding to enable recommendations on the project roadmap.
• Livepeer Inc will focus on driving demand to the network by building the realtime AI products, go to market services, and AI community - initially in the creative realtime AI video space.

If you’re interested in building within this ecosystem, there are lots of opportunities that both contribute to the core development and operations of the project in service of the realtime AI mission, but also to develop companies that service additional markets not currently being focused on. Hopefully the above post gives you a view into what some of those opportunities and gaps are. Then check out the Livepeer Foundation’s recent forum posts on tactical recommendations, and raise your hand to get involved in the ones of interest.