The Theta team has been busy on numerous streams of work pertaining to our testnet — both on internal-facing development and external-facing development. In terms of internal development, we’ve been working on issues such as re-designing our blockchain consensus mechanism, optimizing mesh streaming to support higher quality video and at higher offload efficiencies. External-facing projects have revolved around getting to understand our partners’ technical specifications and requirements, and launching proofs of concepts to begin prototyping with them. Recently, we launched our test channel with Samsung VR, and we are excited about the impending launch with another partner (stay tuned for more on that). To sum up our progress so far, we are excited to see Theta live on real websites and applications. A major knock on blockchain projects is that there is little adoption of the proposed technology. We are aware of that perception and are glad to be one of a few projects leading the charge to break out of that cliche.

As we’ve started collaborating closer with partners like Samsung VR, MBN, and CJ Hello, we’ve prepared a set of development tools for integrating Theta to their video applications. We know that our community has also been anticipating these dev tools. In the spirit of sharing and open collaboration, we wanted to make these tools available to all of you as well. Now, any developer can build DApps on Theta.

The first integration option is an out-of-box solution that uses the Theta player and Theta web widgets to display token earnings and the traffic/bandwidth composition graph. Developers only need to prepare a stream URL and insert a few lines of HTML to embed the Theta player, and a few lines of Javascript to initialize the Theta web widget. In this integration, the mesh streaming library and platform wallet are managed by Theta, which provides a simple and easy way for developers to get started. Samsung VR utilized this approach as an initial integration with Theta.

For more details, take a look at our integration instructions and example.

The second integration option involves integrating the packaged Theta Javascript client library (Github) with an application’s existing player. For now, Theta will maintain the peer server and tracker server (for peering), as well as the platform wallet. Integrating the Theta JS library with an existing native player allows developers to use Theta’s mesh streaming and token rewards tracking, while keeping all of the functionality and settings of the native player. Developers have the option of experimenting with different Theta components on their player such as customizing the types of token earnings and mesh streaming data displayed on the page or collecting custom client-side stats. Moreover, developers are able adjust configurations to optimize for video stream segments (e.g. length, timeouts, etc.) so peering and bandwidth offload are enhanced. We’d like to enable a seamless experience for your users, specific to how users are accustomed to interacting with the application.

Whether we are opening our code to our community or to more corporate integration partners, we would like to provide a number of options to get started with us. First, for a simple glimpse into how Theta can be used with their video, developers can adopt the first integration option and drop the Theta player and widgets into their page. At the same time, we know that each application has specific needs and use cases for their videos so we have the JS library available for developers to include all of the features of their original player, while utilizing the blockchain features that Theta provides.

We’re excited to share these developments with our community. If you have any great DApps, feel free to use either one of these integration options to get started with building on Theta!