StreamSpace — A Space For Streaming Video On Blockchain

The most progressive streaming marketplace in the world

About StreamSpace

StreamSpace incorporates cutting edge technologies like decentralized storage systems and blockchains, which make it the most progressive streaming marketplace in the world. Filmmakers set a price for their work and are paid immediately by consumers, disrupting the traditional industry model.

The Problem

The movie industry, like other subsets of the entertainment industry, is dominated by a handful of distribution leaders that retain the lion’s share of profits generated in the industry. There is a strong Pareto effect: most of the industry’s annual revenues and profits derive from a small number of blockbuster films, with large budgets for promotion, frequently 100–200% of the total cost to create the film. By the time the studios tally up the global revenues and expenses, the small-budget filmmaker typically sees no profit or only a very small return on his investment of time, talent, and money. Furthermore, as many as 80% of the films produced each year are never seen by an audience. For filmmakers, this means that unless you are a “bankable” producer/director, you are at the mercy of a handful of large, powerful studios who have little incentive to deliver a return for your time and creative efforts. For most viewers, it means that you can only watch the handful of films that the studios want to support with broad distribution through theaters, network broadcast, and physical and digital distribution. All of the performing arts industries — music, theater, and film — have undergone strong shifts over the past 100 years as recording / production technologies and distribution technologies have evolved. The internet has nearly destroyed the traditional recording music industry, with US sales of recorded music declining 80% as a share of national GDP compared to 1999.

StreamSpace offers the solution with nine keys components to the StreamSpace platform:

Secure storage method of the video content
Blockchain transaction ledger for enhanced transparency and security.
Front-end decoder and embedded HTML5 player
Content recommendation engine
Secure digital wallet
Private token exchange
Community-focused front end
Social media channels
Initial Coin Offering / Token crowdfunding campaigns

Roadmap

Some potential enhanced features include:

For filmmakers

For film viewers

Quality of Streaming Video Content

StreamSpace uses Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH), which ensures high quality streams over the internet. The original video file is split up into many smaller video file segments of many bitrates and resolution. The fact that DASH content is just “a bunch of files” makes it a good choice for blockchain storage protocols such as IPFS and StreamSpace’s extensions of IPFS. An MPEG-DASH Media Presentation Description (MPD) file will be created for each video file containing the link and video metadata used for streaming.

Crowdfunding Service for New Film

There have been a few examples of token sales expressly designed to support the funding for new film or video projects; further information about some of these projects is provided in the Competition Section. In its early conversations with independent filmmakers, one of the most critical needs expressed was to raise funds to make their film, and a lack of funds is the greatest impediment to a filmmaker’s success. StreamSpace will leverage its experience in conducting its own ICO plus the contacts made across the film and blockchain industries to identify a pool of potential investors 16 StreamSpace White Paper StreamSpace The film enthusiast may prefer to watch on a large fixed viewing screen, such as a 4K+ UHD TV, a standard 720i or 1080p HDTV, a laptop or desktop, with a wide range of screen resolutions, or even a mobile phone or tablet, today commonly with FHD 1920 x 1080 or QHD 2560 x 1440 resolution. StreamSpace will provide a downloadable app with its custom player or run its player inside any of the common internet browsers, but with an initial focus on PCs running mainstream browsers, followed by smartphones and SVOD clients connected to HDTVs. For the initial release, we will deploy a browser-based player optimized for Microsoft Windows and Apple OS. We will develop and deploy mobile apps that will run on both Android and iOS, and we will target several of the major internet TV SVOD client systems, including Google Chromecast, Roku, Microsoft Xbox, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, etc. to allow consumers to add the StreamSpace channel into the viewer home screen. The player includes identity language and format preference with buttons to access and control the user account information, as well as play / pause / rewind / fast forward buttons for the viewer to control the experience. Initially, StreamSpace intends to use Google Widevine, an industrial-grade DRM solution, to support encryption and decryption of video content. The content is encrypted and distributed to the curators. A license will be created for each file and saved to the Widevine license server. On the user end, the license info is fetched from the license server, and the decryption happens on the trusted layer of the system. Decrypted data is directly sent to the user’s video and audio device. Hence there is no chance Content Player and DRM who might be interested in supporting novel film or other video projects.