Theta’s Testnet Brings Blockchain Video Delivery Closer

Alongside the introduction of its decentralized blockchain video streaming protocol, the team announced a $2 million dApp Development Fund. The fund aims to attract the best teams of developers who use Theta’s power to engage users and reduce content delivery costs.

Theta is designed as an open protocol to support video streaming, enterprise video conferencing, online education, music, and journalism, among other types of content creation and distribution.

The pioneering project which turns the Theta project into reality is SLIVER.tv, a leading esports streaming website with over three million users. This trial also aims to confirm Theta's leadership in the digital transformation of content delivery and mainstream availability.

Ajay Singh from Samsung NEXT Ventures stated that they invested in the SLIVER.tv project because of its innovative approach to minimize the bandwidth-intensive costs of video streaming.

He added that Theta’s testnet shows the evolution of SLIVER.tv's initial thesis, and builds on the idea of a decentralized content delivery system. The release of the testnet enables developers to use blockchain in video delivery, ensures content integrity, and rewards content creators in innovative ways.

Aiming to create a user-driven development network, Theta token’s team sent out an open invitation to business partners and community developers to contribute to the ecosystem and design dApps for the launch of the MainNet at the end of 2018.

The first project that received funding from Theta's Dapp Development Fundis Bitmovio, a decentralized Netflix-like video platform incubated at Play Labs at MIT.

Bill Guttentag, a double Oscar-winning filmmaker and Bitmovio founder, stated that Bitmovio and Theta are leading the revolution in transforming streaming from passive to active and the creation of superfans through engagement and interactivity.

Mitch Liu, Co-founder and CEO of Theta Labs, added that the testnet launch extends Theta’s technological head start as the only active decentralized video delivery network. Combined with the fund, developers would be able to push the limits of the blockchain network and create innovative apps.

“We believe future decentralized video platforms will be built on Theta infrastructure - so let's get started.", Liu added.

The Theta open source project is designed on the basis of the Theta mesh delivery protocol client as a packaged Javascript library, and the full source code of the Theta blockchain ledger protocol, server-side Theta wallet, and Blockchain explorer.

Sharing, instant browser-to-browser data stream sharing among users are all handled by the mesh delivery protocol.

The Theta coin rewards, an incentive for bandwidth sharing between users, are governed by the blockchain ledger protocol. The high-performance Proof-of-Stake blockchain is implemented on top of a PBFT consensus engine.