Theta Labs is proud to announce that SamsungVR is spearheading our Theta Media Advisory Council, with the goal of furthering the technical development of the Theta Network.

The SamsungVR platform comprises 360° VR streaming content that can be viewed across every device from mobile to PC to cutting-edge hardware like the Gear VR headset. The SamsungVR library offers a diverse selection of immersive experiences across sports, music, fashion, esports and many others. With one device and network, viewers can experience the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, a Coldplay concert live in Chicago, a fashion and dance show created by Barneys New York or a Harry Potter world created in Minecraft. By delivering impressively large amounts of VR content worldwide, they’ve learned that bandwidth costs quickly add up, with some streams driving 5–10x the amount of data compared to 1080p HD video! As VR tech adoption continues to increase, these bandwidth demands will only become larger.

The solution? The Theta Network, powered by users’ excess bandwidth. Purpose-built to vastly reduce the costs of video streaming by leveraging a decentralized, peer-driven mesh network and a native blockchain protocol. Take the above example of SamsungVR’s coverage of the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang; if millions of concurrent viewers are watching, today the majority would all be pulling from a centralized content delivery network (CDN). What if instead, concentrations of viewers in each country could share the same stream with each other, and reduce the bandwidth used by 60–80%? The cost savings alone would be enormous! This is what the Theta Network will enable, with the Theta Token used as the incentive for each user to share their bandwidth with others on the network.

As part of our partnership, Theta will work closely with the SamsungVR team as we develop the native blockchain and peer-to-peer protocol, prototyping with Samsung engineers to ensure that the network created can satisfy the streaming demands of major content providers like Samsung. Their insights and feedback will be a great help to our development team, and we look forward to building the Theta Network to power streaming sites around the world!