Starting immediately, anyone can watch awesome stuff on LBRY and earn free rewards.

Want to avoid icky words and just install LBRY, laugh at things, and earn your magic internet credits? Go here.

The Journey

In less than a year, over 250,000 people have signed up to put control back in the hands of the content creators and consumers. That's more people than the population of Samoa (which is a place you've probably heard of!). It's a pretty big deal.

There's a reason why people have been clamoring to get in. It's the same reason why some of YouTube's most popular publishers, a surge of gaming channels and independent producers are flooding LBRY. It's because existing methods are fundamentally broken. Giant corporations demand tremendous control and abuse it, rather than fostering choice and freedom. They take half of the creators' money just to move bits around when content consumers could be doing it ourselves.

There's also a reason it's taken a long time for us to move to open beta, and why it's likely to be temporary: it turns out fundamentally rebuilding the way we distribute content from the ground up is kind of hard.

As LBRY has gotten more popular...

...it's also battled a host of network and performance issues.

April was the first month we sent out large chunks of invites, which immediately broke the network. A+ month, would play again.

But while others have been busy focusing on hype and over-promising ("Our next-generation web 6.0 blockchain protocol will decentralize Facebook, solve global warming, and put humans on Mars (via smart contacts). Just send 923,217 ether to this address and wait patiently"), we've been quietly working on something that can be quite beautiful...

Oh-so-sweet end-to-end decentralized digital content discovery, distribution, and purchase! Or as I tell my mom, YouTube without Google.

Despite our progress, we are at best a few hops along the lengthy journey to the summit. We've got a long list of issues to tackle and a longer list of creators to educate.

Additionally, we want to make sure that the rewards we offer new users -- usually, an amount of LBC worth about $5 - $10 -- end up in the hands of people who want to make the network successful.

In fact, that's the whole point of this post!

The Open Beta

Starting today, anyone that downloads and runs the LBRY browser can access the great content already on the network and earn LBRY credits for doing so.

The LBRY browser runs on all major desktop operating systems. To get it, go here.

So, why aren't we shouting a bit more about this?

One, LBRY still isn't in a state for the average person. Two, we're not likely to leave LBRY in this state for long. We'll be monitoring the network performance -- as well as the rates of participation in the rewards programs -- and pause if either gets unacceptable.

After joining the beta, you'll also receive a weekly email, mentioning the great new content added that week and offering additional rewards.

Open beta users can access weekly featured content and earn rewards.

Ready to download? Get LBRY here.

Invites for your Community

We want to get LBRY credits into the hands of users and communities that support content freedom. If you are part of a community that would find LBRY useful or interesting, we can offer invites to the rewards program for your community that does not require full identity verification. Interested? Say hello here.

One More Bonus

We're also going to drop this sweet hype video here, made by the wonderful J.J. Epic of NeoCash Radio.