Lenstube Grant Application

[sasicodes]

Give a 3 sentence description about this proposal.

Lenstube, an open-source web3 video-sharing social media platform built on top of lens protocol and live on Polygon mainnet. We are building a decentralized, and permissionless social media video app for content creators.

Describe the problem you are solving.

Currently, on web2 video platforms, they agree to provide great service to the content creators but we have a lot of problems for content creators like privacy, censorship, and more. Especially web3 content creators, in recent times educational channels got banned and de-platformed without warning or any justification. And so the ownership of the content is not in the creator's hand and is at the risk of being de-platformed anytime.

Describe the solution you are proposing

So we aimed to develop a decentralized video sharing app, where content creators own their video content. By storing videos permanently in Arweave and the data is stored permanently on-chain, no one can restrict users from creating content of their choice, and also users can choose between IPFS and Arweave based on their convenience. Creators can always monetize their content with various means like nft modules and tips.

Describe the scope of the project including a rough timeline and milestones

Milestones achieved so far.

📺 Create channels. 📀 Publish any video content or NFTs. 🔨 Collect video as NFT. 🪞 Mirror and share video across Lens Dapps. 💰 Set membership fees to your channel. 🔔 Notifications about new members, comments, mirrors, and mints. 💲 Customize who can collect your video and associated fees. ❤️ Support any creator by sending a Tip. 🎥 Short videos called Bytes 👍 Like and comment on videos. ❌ NSFW content restrictions. 🌿 Watch later and recently watched videos library. 🎥 Decentralized video transcoding using Livepeer VOD. ⛽️ Completely gasless transactions using Lens relayers 🌠 Serving optimized and compressed images for better UX using CDN.

Website: https://lenstube.xyz/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/lenstubexyz

Discord: https://lenstube.xyz/discord

Phase 1

• Released with all the above features in Polygon mainnet.
• Also separate testnet deployment for continuous UAT (https://testnet.lenstube.xyz/)
• Built a community of 18000+ members in discord and 4000+ on Twitter.
• Improved and optimized the platform with various feedback from the community members and content creators.
• Many content creators and organizations started to create content on the platform.
• About 1000+ videos were uploaded and served by Livepeer VOD within one week from release.

Total development hours: 2 months Team members: 1 Total estimation: 30k USD

Phase 2

Add a contributor to the project and build the following,

• Live streaming feature using Livepeer.
• Token gating static content for private audiences.
• Crowdfunding videos and streams using Livepeer.
• Start building a recommendation algorithm by analyzing the videos and interests.

Estimated development hours: 3 months Team members: 2 Total estimation: 40k USD

and more planned for the next phase based on module NFTs by the lens. 🚀

[nelsorya]

Hey @sasicodes, thanks for putting this together. After discussing with the rest of the Livepeer Grants team we would be willing to offer a grant for this for $10k in LPT cutting back the scope of some of the grant to help get this to an initial PoC. This would be split into 3 milestones.

1. Retroactive Grant ($4k in LPT) - for the work already completed
2. Livepeer Livestreaming integration ($3k)
3. Livepeer Token Gating integration ($3k)

Let me know what you think. If all goes well with this grant, we would be open to exploring additional grants from there.

[sasicodes]

hey @nelsorya,

Thanks for considering this grant.

So far more than 2000 videos have been uploaded and served by Livepeer and providing continuous feedback on the VOD service to the team.

As we advance we are utilizing more services by livepeer for features like streaming, token gating, etc. This requires developer effort and we request the team to reconsider the total and initial retroactive grant. Thanks.

[sasicodes]

We have crossed 4500 video assets 🎉

Any update on this grant @nelsorya ?

[nelsorya]

Hey @sasicodes, great to hear things are going well. That's very impressive growth. After discussing with the team considering the growth you are seeing, we are happy to increase the total grant to $20k in $LPT with the same milestones above.

1. Retroactive Grant ($8k in LPT) - for the work already completed
2. Livepeer Livestreaming integration ($6k) - by end of Dec
3. Livepeer Token Gating integration ($6k) - by end of Dec
4. Add a powered by Livepeer watermark to videos on Lenstube

If all goes well with this grant, we would be open to exploring additional grants from there. On top, the Livepeer Studio team are also happy to throw in $10k in streaming credits for the Livepeer API.