Livestreaming service Streamium will bring peer-to-peer streaming video to viewers combined with bitcoin micropayment channels. Streamers on Streamium can opt to be paid bitcoin per minute from viewers.

Streamium is the product of a loose collective of Argentinian hackers including Manuel Aráoz, developer of ProofOfExistence.com, and Demian Brener, who wrote in a blog post that Streamium’s idea arose from a desire to “empower the long tail of small content creators to open up to the world and get paid accordingly in real time.” Other developers include Esteban Ordano, @franbook, Yemel Jardi, Dario Sneidermanis, and Alex Batallés.

Live video streaming platforms Meerkat (Android and iOS) and Periscope (iOS only) are services Streamium seeks to mimic, but it adds the additional layer of bitcoin pay-per-minute.

Livestreaming is an extremely lucrative profession for a multitude of people especially those who stream videogames. So lucrative, that Amazon.com, Inc. purchased Twitch.tv—the most popular video game livestreaming sites on the Internet—for $970 million in August, 2014. Popular streamers can pull down 20,000 concurrent viewers or more and Jesse Aaron from the Huffington Post estimates that could turn into $6,400 a month with the proper schedule.

With Streamium, each concurrent viewer pays the same microtransaction rate in a pay-per-minute fashion, which means that entertainers who can pull in mass numbers would also be raking in the bitcoin.

Of course, gamers aren’t the only professional niche who might use a pay-per-minute streaming service. Kyle Torpey from Bitcoin Magazine explains in an article that this could be useful for the adult entertainment industry (especially freelancer “Cam Girls”), people streaming (or pirating) live sporting events, on-demand professionals doing consultations, and even teachers providing seminars.

Screenshot of the Streamium.io website. Start broadcasting here, today.

The Streamium platform was designed to be as accessible as possible to both streamers and viewers and works entirely out of the browser. A stream can be started simply: Choose a name, which produces a link separated by dashes that can be shared; add a Bitcoin receipt address; choose a pay-by-hour rate; and finally hit the “START BROADCASTING” button. And viola, the stream starts.

Once broadcasting, the platform generates a sharable link that viewers click on, pay with bitcoins, and then gain access to the broadcast.

Although it functions as-is, Streamium is still in beta and warn users there are known security issues and the service does not offer anonymity. During SiliconAngle’s test this reporter was able to begin broadcasting, but viewers were unable to view the exhilarating livestream of this article being written due to unknown errors. Others, such as Reddit’s naughtymaid69, have had much better luck.

The Stremium web client is still somewhat primitive and currently only uses attached webcams to broadcast a livestream, but in the Reddit announcement tread, a developer said that they hope to enable integration OBS (Open Broadcaster Software), an open-source streaming software solution that many gamers use to broadcast to Twitch. Being able to use OBS could open up a whole new dimension for the usefulness of Streamium.

Open source all the way down

The developers of Stremium released the codebase on GitHub for other enterprising developers to create their own fork or tinker with the concept.

The streaming aspect is done with WebRTC, an open source peer-to-peer browser-to-browser application framework drafted by the World Wide Web Consortium(W3C) and developed by Google. And payments are facilitated by bitcoin and a system called payment channels; using the payment channels micropayments protocol stream watchers can pay out fractions of a bitcoin per time spent as the stream continues in micropayments over time. These payments are done off-chain via the Stremium service and then built into a bulk payment made via the bitcoin blockchain.

The in-browser experience is handled with AngularJS and uses a browser-only model with the peer-to-peer networking meaning that Streamium functions entirely using client browsers, there is no server needed.

photo credit: Ben Andreas Harding via photopin cc