If you haven’t heard the news, SamsungVR went live last month with a new channel powered by the Theta blockchain! SamsungVR’s initial deployment with Theta will stream SLIVER.tv esports content in virtual reality, the first in history to be livestreamed with blockchain. Any user that logs on can start sharing relaying 360 VR streams to other viewers, and the tokens they earn in return are all viewable on the Theta testnet blockchain. The deployment will start with desktop VR, with mobile and VR headset access to be added in the coming months.

While we’re proud of this recent milestone, many people don’t realize that the Theta team’s experience with VR content began long before the Theta project was launched. In fact, Mitch, Jieyi, and the rest of the Theta team actually pioneered VR livestreaming of esports in the early days of SLIVER.tv.

As early as September 2016, SLIVER.tv was creating the first-ever VR livestream of a major esports tournament at ESL One in partnership with Nvidia, live with 10,000 spectators at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn.

This is 360 spherical video! Try clicking and dragging your cursor to look around

Running on a cluster of NVIDIA GPUs the team was able to record multiple in-game 2D streams, render 360 VR images in real-time, then distribute the video to an estimated 50,000 viewers across the SLIVER.tv website, app, and VR app. All of this done live, with essentially zero lag!