STORY
📣 Pitch: NostrWatch.Live 📺
AUTHOR
Yijia SuYijia Su
Joined 2023.10.10
PROJECT
NostrWatch.Live (Stream-To-Earn)NostrWatch.Live (Stream-To-Earn)
DATE
VOTES
sats
COMMENTS
NOSTR
View on Nostr ↗
TAGS
#activity#legends-of-lightning

📣 Pitch: NostrWatch.Live 📺

💡 What and Why NostrWatch.Live?

NostrWatch is a live streaming platform based on decentralized technologies (Lightning Network & Nostr). Content creators get paid directly by its viewers for making live streaming. There's no platform charges or a high percentage of commissions. We are operating in a truly decentralized fashion, everyone can join and start earning money by live streaming. We create a new way based on a value for value approach, where content creators don’s need to rely on advertisement and viewers can make stream payment at the same time they view videos.

🎉 What makes we different from others

  1. We are decentralized

    We are using a truly-decentralized setup for powering all our services

  2. Paid Content Streaming

    Broadcaster can set a rate like charging x sats per minute for their audience. Audience continuously stream sats to broadcaster, while broadcaster continuously stream video to them.

  3. We runs on Nostr and Lightning

    Nostr and Lightning is cool! We are trying to enrich this ecosystem by adding more useful services to them!

  4. Other platforms charge a lot from content providers’ revenue. We don’t.

    We believe that Bitcoin and the Lightning Network are creating a fairer value distribution system. We are developing NostrWatch.Live to accelerate this process.

📺 Pitch & Demo

💯 Features

  • Audience

    • Enjoy advertisement free platform with capacity of supporting video creator directly by sending sats.

    • Users don’t need to pay monthly subscription like Netflix or Disney Plus. They can start and stop stream payment whenever they want. 

    • All content related info is hosted on Nostr, so it will provide a censorship-resistant experience for all users.

  • Broadcaster

    • Easy-to-use streaming station to distribute video content.

    • Log in and start streaming with Nostr identity, no email or KYC needed.

    • Monetize their video content immediately with lightning address by receive streaming sats.

  • deCDN Network Node Provider

    • Make passive incoming by hosting video contents and contributing idle network bandwidth

    • Enhance decentralization of the product. Censorship-resistant content hosting

🛣️ Roadmap

1. Pre-Launch

Our team came up with a simple idea inspired by the book "Mastering Bitcoin" (2nd edition, by Andreas Antonopoulos). The book demonstrated a payment channel method that could be applied to a video streaming service. In this service, viewers would be billed by the second, continuously charging them as they watch. However, this idea was raised few years ago, but this idea has not yet been implemented. We believe there are several reasons, with one primary reason being that we do not have a complete setup of decentralized infrastructure. For example, Lightning Network and Nostr. 

With the recent increasing activities on Nostr and Lightning Network, we believe now we have such underlying infrastructure to make this idea came true. Therefore, we are starting the project with the name "Stream-to-Earn" and participating in the Lightning Hackathon at the Indonesia Bitcoin Conference. We completed a simple proof-of-concept prototype with a simple frontend and a backend for streaming video and collecting payments from Lightning Network. By having this simple PoC, we believe it’s now technically feasible to run the whole system on Nostr and Lightning Network for live-streaming.

2. MVP Launch

We presented the "Stream-to-Earn" concept at the Lightning Hackathon and won the 1st prize. The positive response from people towards the "Value-for-Value" exchange for live-streaming performances inspired us to develop this idea into a fully-fledged product. We have also decided on a new name for it — NostrWatch.Live

NostrWatch.Live is a comprehensive solution for parties such as broadcasters, audience, and decentralized CDN providers. Our goal is to launch this product for public beta access by the end of 2023. Once the MVP is launched, we will encourage broadcasters from other platforms, such as YouTube and Twitch, to join NostrWatch.Live and experience our product.

Currently, we are working diligently to achieve this goal. We have finished most deliverables. Like StreamerStation, which broadcaster can capture their video input using software like OBS and stream to our network. We also have a frontend SDK and tools for viewer to watch video and pay using Lightning extensions and Alby.

During the MVP launch, we will host the CDN network using Cloudflare. Although this is not a decentralized solution, it is the fastest way to get our delivery network ready in a short time. Our CDN architecture enables the possibility of running NostrWatch with existing cloud service infrastructure.

3. Enabling Decentralized CDN Networking

Once we are satisfied with the overall product performance based on the user feedback we collected during the MVP phase, we will proceed to launch the decentralized CDN. This will allow users to run their own software and become content delivery service providers in NostrWatch. This provides them with an opportunity to generate passive income while adding an additional level of decentralization to our product.

4. Mass Adoption

The final step will involve considering how to enable the scalability and widespread adoption of this product. One idea is to convert active content providers on platforms such as YouTube or Twitch to use NostrWatch.Live. While we haven't yet developed a concrete plan for this, we believe that certain exclusive features offered by NostrWatch, such as two-way zapping (where broadcasters can switch to their viewers) and zero commission for paid content streaming, will be appealing to them.

💪 Achievements

  • Our Proof of Concept (Stream-to-Earn) win the first prize at Indonesia Lightning Hackathon

  • Our core team member was invited to NostrAsia Hong Kong conference and we gave a panel speech on this new approach of Value-for-Value content-money swapping

🛠️ In Progress

  • UI/UX improvements. We redesign the whole website and now we are actively working on the new UI and UX of our product.

  • Marketing. We already connect several bitcoin educator who is willing to use our product. They will join as our first batch of users. One of our core member also has a great influence on Nostr community and he will be talking about latest updates on Nostr on NostrWatch.Live

  • User Testing: We are recruiting a small batch of users to be our early audience and CDN provider

👩‍💻 Tech stack

  • TypeScript: StreamStation, Frontend SDK and CDN Nodes

  • Voltage Node (+ LNBits for accounting)

  • Nostr: Nostr login functionality, user can use same private key as they use Damus/Habla.news or all applications building on nostr.

  • Lightning: Use for payment