Kelly Robertson
Blockchain use cases keep growing with the day. Generally speaking every big platform should be afraid to a certain extent, as there are startups out there trying to decentralize pretty much every cool service under the sun.
YouTube and video streaming websites are not the exception, with at least one company trying to challenge their dominance. Called Lino, it has recently secured $20 million in funding through a private token sale. Led by ZhenFund, “all that cash” will be used to help Lino build its video distribution network with blockchain technology, as well as a streaming DApp (decentralized app) — both of which will be launched later this year.
“We believe that blockchain has enormous potential to empower video creators by decentralizing how their content is distributed and ensuring that their earnings go directly into their pockets,” Wilson Wei, CEO of Lino, said in a statement. “We want to eliminate the middlemen in video streaming.”
In addition to ZhenFund, FBG Capital, DFund, and INBlockchain also participated in the funding round.
Making the system that works for everyone
Whereas traditional video platforms have significant partnership hurdles and take up to a 60 percent cut, Lino’s blockchain-based platform aims to ensure content value can be recognized efficiently and reward all contributors across the board. This way, the company believes, more fair long-term economic growth will be promoted, making sure that all parties are incentivized.
Lino’s infrastructure will provide five key components:
- Free Transactions: Users can use LINO tokens (LINO) to pay content creators.
- Incentivized Currency System: The platform creates a sustainable digital content economy by incentivizing all community contributions, including content creation, content redistribution, and infrastructure services.
- Proof of Human Engagement: Lino’s software will protect against potential attacks as well as bots from manipulating the reward distribution.
- Proof of Content Value: Lino measures the revenue generated from content as its value reflected in the market, taking several measures to prevent the system from being flooded with fraud.
- Auctioning Content Delivery Network (CDN) and Storage: Lino offers a peer-to-peer, auction-based CDN. The service stores video and live stream playback in a decentralized manner by using an auction approach to achieve decentralization.
Does Lino have a future?
In order to compete, Lino would have to prove its worth, and that means it is as reliable as existing, centralized services. Also, it would help if the company scores some big contract which it can then use as a poster-child for convincing other companies to switch boats (and use Lino instead of some other service).
The fact that Lino won’t have ads, and that it will be more cost effective for potential customers does play a role. Also, since it will actually reward those watching videos — as well as all other parties on the platform — it may quickly gain traction. Which, we think, sounds like a plan. What do you say?
