Closed clacladev closed 1 year ago
Hey @ccarnino, thanks for putting this together, this sounds like a very interesting project. After reviewing, I'm afraid we do not feel this is a public good project but more of a potentially for-profit app. if this was open source and something that could help to attract more developers to the Livepeer ecosystem, it could be something Livepeer Grants could potentially fund.
Hi @nelsorya, thanks for the feedback. To try to clarify: the core of our project is to built an SDK that developers can use to easily build social video apps.
We will release all of the infrastructure (SDK, smart contracts, examples/tutorials, documentation, etc) as open source.
The app is just a proof-of-concept to validate the idea and start getting some traction around the project, to show the capabilities of the SDK that we will build. The key part of the project is the developer tooling part, not the app. What we really care about is making it easy for developers to launch new social video apps for different niches, audiences, creators.
The SDK will build on top of Livepeer for transcoding, so we believe this will directly support your aim of attracting more developers to the Livepeer ecosystem (and also more traffic on the Livepeer network).
Apologies if the above wasn’t immediately clear from our application, hope that we’ve managed to clarify. Taking this clarification into account, would you be happy to consider funding this grant proposal? Thanks
Thanks this proposal is great and you have identified a real need. I will follow up privately on discord and we can work out if there is any way we can consolidate efforts on this with what Livepeer Studio are working on
Give a 3 sentence description about this proposal.
Hi, we’re Claudio (https://tugulab.org/) and Simone (https://www.linkedin.com/in/simonebertaiola/). We’re building ClapClap 👏, a developer tool/web3 infrastructure product focused on video content creation and monetisation.
We aim to create tooling, smart contracts and a suite of SDKs to make it easy for developers to create the next generation of video apps, based on battle-tested web3 technologies and primitives.
Until now, we’ve analysed the market, done initial design and created a basic YouTube-like demo application where users can create channels and upload videos. This grant will help us in: adding monetisation features to the demo app; engaging with niche web3 communities to start validating and marketing our concept; using the app to upload videos of niche dev communities (e.g.: uploading StarkWare community calls onto our demo app) as a way to gather developer interest; building the first version of the SDK with high quality developer documentation and examples; building out our customer-facing website.
Describe the problem you are solving.
On current video platforms, creators and content that cannot go viral/mainstream are not profitable. To make a living, creators need millions of views from each piece of content they create. To do so they tune their content on the metrics that the suggestion algorithms pay attention to, leading to a loss of diversity.
Current video platforms have incredibly high take rates: YouTube is around 50%, TikTok is 100%.
Video is ‘eating the internet’ - studies shows how >50% of users would like to see more video content from brands or businesses they support, and young people in particular consistently prefer video content. Despite this heavy focus on videos, video creators, on average, still struggle with monetisation.
Platforms like YouTube are the place where an incredible amount of human experience is stored and documented, from history to culture to education. This trove of knowledge is an important resource that should be preserved for future generations.
From a technological perspective, current SaaS/cloud services are great to cheaply bootstrap a new app, but become prohibitively expensive at scale. Web3 infrastructure is cheaper at scale than Web2 equivalents.
Last but not least, developers need to reinvent the ‘social video’ stack every time they want to build a new social app with video content.
Describe the solution you are proposing.
We are proposing to build web3-native developer tooling to enable the next generation of social video apps.
At a basic level, we are creating tooling where, in practice, a developer would be able to easily create apps where:
⁃ a user drops a video, this is transcoded on LivePeer, stored on IPFS, pinned with Filecoin and the video is represented by a newly-minted NFT giving ownership of that video to the creator;
⁃ direct content monetisation mechanisms can be easily added (tipping, subscriptions, collectibles, pay to unlock, etc)
In the long term, we are aiming to be a one-stop shop for developers that want to build out video apps. We aim to be web3-powered while consolidating web2 practices, offering features such as:
The apps that will be built on our infrastructure will be able to offer new features to their users: ownership of content, transferability of content between different apps using this infrastructure and integrated monetisation.
We have a proof-of-concept implementing video upload, transcoding, storage and playback of a video with good performances. Here’s a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS6h_YZFAx8
Describe the scope of the project including a rough timeline and milestones
With this grant, we’re planning to carry out the work outlined below, subdivided in three phases/milestones. In this breakdown, we also estimated the hours needed for each activity.
Milestone 1 (expected completion: August 22)
Milestone 2 (expected completion: September/October 22)
Milestone 3 (expected completion: November/December 22)
Grant request
We are looking for a grant of $60k in total, and we’d propose the following payment schedule: