VideoCoin AMA Recap
CryptoDiffer team
Hello everyone!
We are glad to meet here:
Halsey Minor – @halseyminor (Founder and CEO at VideoCoin)
Kellam Ames – @sheppkellam (Director of Ecosystem Development)
Can you introduce yourself to the community? What is your background and how did you come to the idea to create your project?
Halsey Minor
CEO
So in my 25 year career, I have founded or cofounded companies that now exceed over $145 billion in market value prior to entering the blockchain world. These companies include CNET, salesforce.com, Vignette, OpenDNS, Google Voice, NBCi and in the blockchain arena I first started Uphold in 2013 and began building the VideoCoin Network in 2018. In addition to founding these companies I built CNET into a NASDAQ 100 company as a founder and CEO.
In 2017, the Live Planet team had built the world’s best end-to-end VR streaming service centered around an advanced video cloud platform, but was shocked by the cost of VR processing, storage and delivery charged by the existing legacy cloud providers. For example, one Live Planet VR camera, streaming content for 24/7 cost $28,000 for one (1) month. This onerous pricing from the capital intense and centralized legacy cloud providers drove us to search for a solution. We recognized that the innovation and price advantages of decentralized blockchains, and the “sharing economy” models utilized by Uber and AirBnB, could be applied to large scale video infrastructure.
This led to the relationship with the VideoCoin Development Association (VDA) with the VDA engaging Live Planet to bring its strategic, advisory, engineering, and advanced media expertise as the implementation services provider to birth the VideoCoin Network as a viable business solution for all video creators and distributors.
Kellam Ames
Director of Ecosystem Development
Hello everyone. So I am a 20 year veteran of executive of sales and marketing at both GE Information Services and JDA focused on the technology sector. I have an MBA in Intl Business and have invested in or been part of start-upis with Halsey since 1994 with CNET. I love working with high performing teams that are changing the world through disruptive tech and that’s precisely what we do at VideoCoin.
CryptoDiffer team
Can you briefly describe what is VideoCoin in 3-5 sentences?
Kellam Ames
Director of Ecosystem Development
The Videocoin network is a decentralized video encoding, storage, content delivery system that turns all cloud-based video services into an efficient algorithmic market running on a new block chain with a native protocol token, Videocoin. Powered by large scale, distributed cloud video infrastructure, Videocoin network will usher in the new cloud era as it harnesses unused computing resources from around the world to revolutionize the video industy on the block chain. Think of it as the Uber or Airbnb for video delivery on the Internet. The Videocoin Network Ecosystem will deliver dramatic cost reductions by deploying unused compute resources, and with our open APIs and full open source stack will allow Innovation as our platform becomes a pallet for the next Netflix, YouTube, or Hulu. It will majorly disintermediate the media behemoths with peer to peer video distribution and enhance privacy with decentralized end to end encryption
Halsey Minor
CEO
Processing and distributing video has become one of the worlds largest industries with video being 80% of internet traffic growing 25% per year. All of this business goes to 3 centralized expensive providers and we intend to change that.
CryptoDiffer team
What are the major milestones you achieved since Token Sale?
Kellam Ames
Director of Ecosystem Development
There has been so much guys
It has been a long road and we are excited for whats next. Here is a summary of our journey since token sales.
https://medium.com/videocoin
And now…we are launching with Fuji, our operating software on our utiliity platform and our fist use case!
https://medium.com/videocoin/a-new-medium-for-blockchain-news-aca26ed9740
Fuji will launch on August 27
Cryptodiffer Community
Excess token inflation is the most common problems, projects are facing now a days…How Videocoin is overcoming from such problem?
How a content publisher & worker getting payment & please explain ground payment mechanism of Videocoin?
Kellam Ames
Director of Ecosystem Development
Yes. Highly inflationary environments are not recommended for real-world business. Inflationary token economics has no basis for value creation other than the Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO).
The general tokenomic model used by majority of ICOs in the 2017 frenzy were fundamentally flawed.
Videocoin burned 70% of our original inflationary token supply and will cap tokens at the current 265M level and mint no future tokens.
Reward tokens are automatically purchased by the Network from exchanges, at the then-prevailing price, when a job is started. These are later awarded to the selected Worker Node(s) upon verified completion of work. The number of tokens purchased (and awarded) is proportional to the job cost.
Cryptodiffer Community
How POS improve videocoin and if i stack VID i will rewarded by VID tokens ?
Kellam Ames
Director of Ecosystem Development
Stakers are receive a portion of the fiat (tokenized) payments to the Worker Nodes they stake. In addition they receive proportional amounts of the VID token rewards that the Workers earn for completed and verified work. The exact splits are dependent on the contractual terms between Stakers and their staked Workers.
Validators, or Verification Nodes, are special cases of Workers. They too receive both fiat payments for their work, and VID token rewards.
Cryptodiffer Community
Can you explain how mining works on the VideoCoin network and how users can participate in the mining process ?
What is the utility of the VID token and how is a user encourage to use it ?
Kellam Ames
Director of Ecosystem Development
We answered above but here again – Stakers are receive a portion of the fiat (tokenized) payments to the Worker Nodes they stake. In addition they receive proportional amounts of the VID token rewards that the Workers earn for completed and verified work. The exact splits are dependent on the contractual terms between Stakers and their staked Workers.
Validators, or Verification Nodes, are special cases of Workers. They too receive both fiat payments for their work, and VID token rewards.
Cryptodiffer Community
How optimistic are you of the future use-case of the videocon compared to when you started it?
What are the next planned steps to increase adoption and awareness among people and more specifically among professional asset management?
Kellam Ames
Director of Ecosystem Development
Today, 80% of internet traffic is video, growing at 25% per year. We estimate the total addressable market for video processing at ~$25 billion/year in 2018, growing at that same 25% y-o-y.
Because we have experience building video clouds, and experience building blockchain companies, there was a clear opportunity to use decentralization to leverage underutilized compute power and lower the cost of video.
Honestly, the Video market is SO BIG, Netflix is a small part of it. It would be great to get Netflix, and we have the best Hollywood Business Development team out there with Hanno Basse and Seth Shapiro, but the opportunity is so large… think about your Nest Doorbell or Arlo Security Camera or the Camera that your city runs to record traffic.. We dont realize, but all of this is VIDEO. Self driving cars.. VIDEO. So video is exploding. We’re in a good market.
Cryptodiffer Community
Should I assume that the mining of Videocoin netwrok should be done through GPU?
What are the new challenges that arise specifically for the development of your network? I see that it is interesting and diverse.
Halsey Minor
CEO
You will be able to use either GPU or CPU mining although initially we will support CPU mining. All modern processors have video encoders. Videocoin mining does not require special cards unlike token mining, opening up virtually every processor becoming a minor.
Cryptodiffer Community
Whenever you started this project then what points do keep in mind. tell about that
If the projects that were planned for the future of your project are not fulfilled, then how will they cope with that situation and how will they come out of that situation
Halsey Minor
CEO
I’ve started a number of companies over the last 25 years. The key to being able to deliver on your company goals is the quality of the people hired. I know this sounds like a simple answer but its the truth. We have some of the best video engineers in the world. Our CTO built Intels video streaming cloud, sold to Facebook so he is one of the few people to actually build a video cloud over the last 7 years.
Cryptodiffer Community
How you are seeing Videocoin better and more efficient from your competitors like Cloudera, open DNS? How will you implement the features better than NETFLIX in your upcoming upgrades?
How you managed to achieve :
1)High cost of Encoding
2)Storing
3)Delivering media files to Internet
Kellam Ames
Director of Ecosystem Development
We arent competitor to Cloudera or OpenDNS. We are video endcoding, storage and delivery like AWS, Google Could, MSFT Azure…
The VideoCoin Network is not primarily about increasing video processing speed. It is aimed at reducing cost, and optimizing processing on the network by algorithmically-driven selection of the best worker nodes.
That said, the Network’s distributed approach does enable faster processing because it splits an encoding task into several subtasks and processes them in parallel. This enables the production of video content consisting of much higher frame rates on commodity hardware. This is especially important for live streaming and for VR video content, which requires a frame rate of 30 FPS as opposed to 1 FPS for standard video content.
A given video processing job will, as part of its specifications, include the desired frame rate and overall turnaround time (speed of processing), which is factored-in to the selection of the appropriate Worker Node(s).
Cryptodiffer Community
What is your strongest advantage that you think will make your team leading the market?
In contrast, what is your weakness? How do you plan to overcome it?
Halsey Minor
CEO
The advantage comes from the architecture of the blockchain. By being able to operate a distributed network of resources we can easily tap under utilized compute. It is estimated 30% of datacenter servers are not used. Its more than $20 billion in assets not used. This allows those computers to make money will undercutting Amazon Web Services. The marketing is growing 25% per year so there is so much organic growth we dont even need to take a lot of it to create something large.
Cryptodiffer Community
What is the difference between encoding & transcoding ?
Is VideoCoin a native blockchain ?
Kellam Ames
Director of Ecosystem Development
Encoding refers to taking “raw” unprocessed video and compressing (encoding) it using one of many possible video compression standards or “codecs” (e.g., H.264, MPEG-2, ProRes), to reduce size and bandwidth requirements. (Some define encoding as the conversion of analog material to digital, but in our case, all incoming material would be digital already.)
Transcoding refers to converting a source video file, possibly already compressed (encoded), to one or more additional formats, using any number of different codecs and settings. Generally speaking, transcoding is usually used to generate multiple video qualities/formats from a single source. This is done because different end-user devices/platforms require different video formats, and varying bandwidth requirements (including dynamically-changing bandwidth availability) demand the use of various compression levels and even compression standards (codecs) to achieve smooth streaming playback with minimal loss of quality.
Cryptodiffer Community
Can we see in the future that streaming sites like Amazon Prime and Netflix are using VideoCoin network ?
Does VideoCoin have any competitors in the Blockchain industry ?
Kellam Ames
Director of Ecosystem Development
Absolutely. You got it! VideoCoin is a low cost video infrastructure service that competes with AWS, Google and other large scale providers for encoding, storage, and delivery.
There are a few point solutions in the market, but none at scale offering full stack services with the Hollywood meda relationships and expertise we have
Cryptodiffer Community
The video coin is an improved project with the support of the blockchain platform, so what are the advantages and disadvantages of having this support?
Transaction speed and security are always a key issue for all projects, with Troy, how do you stabilize these issues? LESS problem.
Kellam Ames
Director of Ecosystem Development
We use the blockchain as a protocol ledger. All the protocol activities are brokered and recorded on the blockchain, including proofs of work (proof of transcoding), reputation management and resource negotiation.
All high-throughput and compute operations like transcoding and storage happen off chain. The proof of those activities however is stored onchain.
Cryptodiffer Community
Could you tell some products you have built for your businesses? What do you intend to do to keep increasing adoption? What is your vision in next few years?
Kellam Ames
Director of Ecosystem Development
On August 8 we announced the Blockchain VR Network live on VideoCoin! We have the biggest voices in crypto to a new VR network called the Blockchain VR network. It features the top blockchain influencers in the crypto-sphere and is growing quickly. This means the people who advise about tokens projects and economics run on the VideoCoin network today. http://bvrn.videocoin.network/
As we roll out our quarterly tech releases we will announce new partners. The BVRN is important because it keeps awareness of our project high and growing.
Streaming partners are just our starting point, as its’ a very small piece of the overall video space. We want to start with video live streaming workloads and get the quality of the network to the level necessary for a Hollywood studio. That’s a process.
As we climb the road to Everest and continue to release upgrades each quarter with Fuji, Kilimanjara, K2, etc there will be partnership announcements coming!
Cryptodiffer Community
I see in your website “The VideoCoin Network is a decentralized video platform that is redefining the process of creating, storing and distributing video content”. my question is how do you stop materials like child porn and violent video ? do you have an algorithm that can detect it ?
Kellam Ames
Director of Ecosystem Development
This is a difficult question. We are not really in a position, either technically or legally, to unilaterally inspect and police content that runs through the system. And VideoCoin Network is also not a user-facing streaming platform. To the degree that we are made aware of illegal or other abusive content is being processed by the VideoCoin Network, we have the ability to ban users (publishers) who are engaging in the illegal activity, and we will have safeguards in place should that arise.
Cryptodiffer Community
Can you tell us some of the goals you’re looking forward to accomplishing the most with VideoCoin? What biggest challenges do you faced after starting this project?
What future developments would you expect would be most appealing to larger institutions?
Kellam Ames
Director of Ecosystem Development
Video is fundamental to the human experience. It is the way we connect, the way we learn, the way we express, the way we grow. As such we believe that this experience should be in the hands of everyone, and not in the control of few.
It took AWS 10 years to build their infrastructure. We are doing it in 2….but the blockchain unleashes this ability and we have the best team in the industry to do it.
The future is dramatically reducing cost so the media content providers have an alternative to use the revenues for content, not infrastructure, coupled with opening up innovation for the next generation of Hulu, Netflix and others…
Cryptodiffer Community
What is the videocoin business revenue system ?
For any project Adoption amd awareness is necessary So, What are the videocoin Development and adoption plans to grow the project ?
Kellam Ames
Director of Ecosystem Development
VideoCoin generates revenue by providing services to companies that want to distribute video. VideoCoin encodes, stores and streams video globally across the internet in a variety of formats and bandwidths and companies pay VideoCoin for those services.
Cryptodiffer Community
I just read an article from you in Medium about who participated in NYC Blockchain Week and Consensus 2019, do you see interest from people? ^_^
Have any “influencer” talked with you about the project? Again, do you see interest in entering this great opportunity?
Kellam Ames
Director of Ecosystem Development
We had a great showing at Consensus. We have a large following of loyal influencers that follow and love our project, thankfully! Recently announced, the top crypto influencers are signing up to our first live app, the Blockchain VR Network. This is our staring point, and we will be rapidly growing this amazing new ecosystem with VIdeoCoin!
https://www.newswire.com/news/worlds-first-blockchain-vr-network-set-to-launch-featuring-top-content-20965155
Cryptodiffer Community
How do you plan to overthrow the three giants (Netflix, YouTube and Hulu already exploring the online video industry?
What are the obstacles you came across as you execute this project and how do you overcome them?
Kellam Ames
Director of Ecosystem Development
YouTube is a consumer-facing video service. VideoCoin is a video infrastructure service that competes with AWS, Google and other large scale providers for encoding, storage, and delivery. A competitor to YouTube could actually use the VideoCoin Network as its infrastructure.
Cryptodiffer Community
I Heared that you are using tokenized fiat currency for VideoCoin? What is the reason behind this?
How many Active user Using “Publisher StudioAlpha” in #VID platform?
Kellam Ames
Director of Ecosystem Development
Because of our strong hollywood media connections, we recognized that most large media publishers, indeed, most video processing customers (especially larger corporations like media studios and production service providers), will never be comfortable transacting in cryptocurrency of any kind. Frankly, it’s a fatal flaw of our industry and the number one barrier to adoption.
In March 2019 we announced that we are partnering with a third-party company to provide seamless conversion of fiat currency – used by publisher customers to pay for services – to a tokenized form of fiat that is used internally within the VideoCoin Network to compensate Workers and Stakers.
Thus, we can leverage both fiat (cash) payments, alongside the utility of the VID token, to enable and optimize processing within the network, without exposing anything about crypto to a typical business customer. Most ICO d’App projects will have this same on-board and adoption issue when they approach actual enterprise customers.
Cryptodiffer Community
Which benefits do you think that CryptoDiffer can bring to VideoCoin ? I think there are some ICO ratings which has same function as CryptoDiffer(some features, not all), but your team choose CryptoDiffer to do this AMA, is there any reason for this?
Kellam Ames
Director of Ecosystem Development
We have participated in multiple AMA groups. Cryptodiffer is but one of them, but we love these guys!
Cryptodiffer Community
What isTrigger mes-sages when chained with other contracts? Why VideoCoin use it?
I saw your project ICO has ended last year and listed on coingecko ! But why your tokens is inactive and not listed on any exchanges? In future, if it have, where will you plan to list first? Will it listed on Coinmarketcap and in top 100?
What is Fuji and what is Fuji missions ? Why VideoCoin planned to launch it?
Kellam Ames
Director of Ecosystem Development
We understand that disrupting the biggest traffic generator on the internet — Video is not an easy task. It’s like climbing everest and one needs to climb smaller peaks before we get there. So we’ve called our releases after mountains, starting with VideoCoin Fuji Release, moving on to Kilimanjaro, K2 and finally Everest. These releases are planned to be separated by a quarter, gives us enough time to build and scale network functionality.
Updated roadmap page is going to be launched on Aug 27th along with a roadmap blog. But we are super excited about the upcoming launch, which is going to bring the following features:
- VideoCoin Studio
- Livestream video using the VID
- Developer API via REST
- Wallet management
- Create and manage multiple RTMP pipelines
- Open Source Release
- VideoCoin protocol release
- VideoCoin Protocol Ledger now in production
- Symphony Scalable Blockchain Interface in Production
- RPC/HTTP Workers
- Distributed Encoders RTMP → HLS
- Multiple profiles Workers
- Verifiers (pHash)
- Stream Explorer
- Blocks, TxNS and overall network status
- Initial Token Distribution
- Ethereum-VideoCoin Bridge
- REST API
Cryptodiffer Community
I honestly do not fully understand this project. Could you tell us a case of everyday life where Videocoin facilitates the life of the internet?
Videocoin has / will have a 100% independent network or is / will it be anchored to some other blockchain? (I’m sorry I’m barely knowing your project)
Kellam Ames
Director of Ecosystem Development
This is infrastructure, so the end user will not directly be aware. We are bringing the power of blockcchain and decentralization to the internet. End users will see a greater diversity of video services and related innovation powered by the VideoCoin Network (under the hood) 🙂
Cryptodiffer Community
How Mining Works In #VID Platform? What task Need to do for getting staking reward a user?
You have choose Kucoin For listing #VID token, What is the Reason behind this? & What are your expetations With Kukoin Listing?
Kellam Ames
Director of Ecosystem Development
Mining in VideoCoin network is actual work. So we call them workers. Workers perform video encoding, storage and distribution work.
When they perform the required work and submit proofs to the blockchain, they get compensated in Fiat and reputation is increased or decreased using VID. Our CTO is unfortuntely not on this AMA but will be posting additional details of this later. Thanks 😉
We are listing with KuCoin and Beaxy to start. KuCoin is promoting select projects with an innovative and fun engagement platform.
https://kucoinplay.com/videocoin-contest-30k
Cryptodiffer Community
Can you explain whats the token metrics of videocoin?
How does Storage mining work?
Kellam Ames
Director of Ecosystem Development
Yes. Raise was between approx. .40 to $1. Average price was around $.50
% of first year supply at launch or approx 18M tokens on the launch of trading.
Original supply was 880M tokens. In March 2019, VideoCoin announced we burned 70% of inflationary mining tokens, so the total supply is now 265M fixed.
Cryptodiffer Community
One ancient Chinese said:”To win wars, you need to know yourself and your enemies also”. So to be an unique project with specific features, how will your project be different from other project which has same functions?
How optimistic are you of the future use-case of the Perl compared to when you started it? How will content on the platform be priced? Is there any chance that the content will be overpriced? Who will oversee the price system?
Kellam Ames
Director of Ecosystem Development
Video is a BIG market and a lot of players are trying different things. We like this blog by Zokama https://medium.com/@zokama/comparing-decentralized-video-platforms-introduction-5c26b72ea83e
Slightly outdated, but still awesome. The most interesting decentralized competitor to us is FileCoin and the IPFS protocol. This project very publicly raised $250M to build a decentralized service model of unused compute, but is only focused on storage solution with IPFS, that competes with DropBox essentially. They have not made any announcements of a launch, and storage accounts for 6% of the internet. Video represents 80% of the internet and VideoCoin offers encoding, storage and deliver infrastructure.
Like the Avengers, we have assembled the strike team of next generation media infrastructure!
Hanno Basse – he’s now serving as President of Decentralized Media Solutions at Live Planet. Before that he spent the last seven years as the chief technology officer (CTO) at the 20th Century Fox Filmp. And 14 years before that at DIRECTV. He’s got a ton of credentials, patents, and industry respect and connections.
Hanno’s not the only Big Media executive to be excited about and involved in making the VideoCoin Network vision a reality.
Ted Schilowitz – he’s the Futurist in Residence at Paramount Pictures / Viacom (incl. MTV, Nickelodeon) and helps this major media company (which is now merging with CBS, so it’s even bigger) explore and adopt all the latest new tech into the business – like blockchain! Ted has a ton of experience and accomplishment in the media industry and is a huge believer in the VideoCoin Network vision; it’s great to have him on the team.
Similarly, we have John Ward – he’s EVP and CTO at InDemand. And was previously Senior Vice President of Content Operations for DIRECTV/AT&T Entertainment Group, responsible for on- air production for the Group’s original entertainment. John has won 12 Emmy Awards (highest recognition for television production) and has produced a ton of television shows.
He’s an invaluable asset in helping the VideoCoin Network develop to be able to take advantage of the literal cloudburst of production (hundreds of series every year) that all the streaming services like Netflix and others are making
Cryptodiffer Community
What’s your position regarding the listing of Futures of VID? xFutures is listing xVID tomorrow, was it authorized by the team?
Kellam Ames
Director of Ecosystem Development
No. Not sure what xFutures is. We are officially listing on KuCoin and Beaxy
Cryptodiffer Community
How did You select strategic partners and early investors ?
Why was the bonus structure of the perlin token sale an issue ?
Kellam Ames
Director of Ecosystem Development
Seed round contributors some of the worlds largest and most staregic partners. They provided advisory services, connections to global data centers, and valuable marketing
Notable Contributors include Mike Novogratz and Galaxy Digital, Alphabit Fund, Binary Financial, Science Blockchain, Distributed Network Advisors, Tokenstack Partners, Arcadia Crypto Ventures, Jump Investors, Lvna Capital, Team In Residence, iCapital, GRIT CAPITAL, RenGen.io, AlphaCoin Fund, Origin Capital and Polybius Capital.
Cryptodiffer Community
Can you explain how data centers work on the VideoCoin network?
Kellam Ames
Director of Ecosystem Development
Data Centers (actually, all Worker Nodes) are the core of the Network – they do the work, and are compensated for it in payment and token rewards.
Worker Nodes can offer their services to process (encode/transcode), store, and/or distribute video files. Each Worker Node is scored based on performance and staking, and thereby has a specific probability of being selected by the VideoCoin Network’s algorithm to work on a specific job or portion of a job. Of course, they would only be selected for encoding if they offer that as one of their services; ditto for storage and distribution.
It is likely that most of the work on the Network will be performed by data centers exploiting their unused/underused/dormant capacity. But there is no reason smaller, even individual home users, can’t be part of the Network, and selected based on their capability and performance.
The algorithm is designed to set aside a portion of the Worker Nodes chosen for new and smaller entrants, to keep the ecosystem balanced and growing. Multiple Worker Nodes of varying size and capacity may perform portions of the total work for a given processing task as it is split into multiple parallel subtasks.
Cryptodiffer TEAM
Awesome, thank you @halseyminor @sheppkellam for taking your time and for the detailed answers!
It was very interesting to read, we will prepare recap in few days, so those who are interested can read all the answers!
It was a pleasure to conduct an AMA with such a cool project like VideoCoin. Thank you everyone who participated!
@halseyminor @sheppkellam hope to see you once again in our chat with big updates!
