We are happy to share the news that Livepeer Inc has raised $8M from institutional investors to support the further development of the Livepeer ecosystem. The company will be using the capital to continue to invest in the buildout of the Livepeer protocol, network, and software, as well as to productize on top of the network to drive adoption amongst scaled video applications and independent video developers.

The round was led by Northzone, who brings significant media experience as the first investors in Spotify, in addition to a video investing history through platforms like FuboTV and VideoPlaza. Additional participants include firms Digital Currency Group, Libertus, Collaborative Fund, Notation Capital, Compound, North Island, Coinfund, and StakeZero — all of which have a deep understanding of decentralized networks, blockchain technology, and are eager to help Livepeer create a disruptive decentralized video infrastructure. Also participating were video technology company Haivision, inventors of the SRT protocol and industrial encoding leaders, and Ben Rubin, founder of video applications Houseparty and Meerkat. David Mendels, former CEO of Brightcove, has joined the company as an active advisor as well.

In the year since launching the Livepeer protocol on mainnet, thousands of users have participated in securing and operating the protocol, over 30 infrastructure operators have run live on the network, and over 100 events have been streamed using Livepeer’s technology. The upcoming Streamflow release will take this early functional network, and make it reliable and cost-effective for scaled usage. We’re excited that this new capital will enable Livepeer to productize this technology and drive adoption amongst not only apps and DApps, but scaled video-enabled businesses and enterprises as well.

We’re building the first developer product on top of Livepeer

Livepeer Inc. is helping to bootstrap the network by beginning to develop products that will get video flowing into the network. We’re starting with plugins that enable existing transcoding services and media servers to run Livepeer under the hood, increase their revenue, and reduce capital expenditure. We think product offerings through existing video developer workflows are the fastest ways to gain adoption of the open source infrastructure.

A single $700/month AWS server instance can transcode 2–4 video streams at a time, requiring users to deploy many media servers to scale to many streams.

Currently, video platform companies pay high infrastructure costs to companies like Amazon or Google for operating their transcoding services for customers, capturing only a margin or license fee on top.