Nearly 90% of Livepeer fee revenue is from five validators

Some events change everything about the world while others accelerate existing trends.

Remote work, Tik Tok, telemedicine, online education, and virtual events like Messari Mainnet are just some of the trends that have grown rapidly out of necessity. Video streaming – both pre-recorded and live streaming – is a vital core component that enables all of these growing consumer behaviors.

The importance of video transcoding

Covid-19 has accelerated the growth of video. According to a 2017 report by Cisco, 82% of all internet traffic will come from video by 2021. The same report found that live video will account for 13% of Internet video traffic that same year. It’s safe to say that these numbers will be met as countries around the world are asking Netflix and Youtube to stream content in lower definition to avoid overloading the Internet.

Twitch, Youtube, Amazon, or Netflix all perform services that enable you to stream shows, videos, or events. These platforms perform the vital service of video transcoding. Transcoding converts video and audio files into a format, frame size, and bitrate that can be utilized by a particular device.

Video transcoding costs are different for live streaming compared to pre-recorded videos. Transcoding pre-recorded videos is fairly cheap as Amazon prices a 720p and above video at $0.034 per minute meaning an hour-long video would cost just over $2. Amazon also charges data transfer prices for moving videos to different geographic locations.

Live video is more expensive to transcode and varies by company size with larger companies able to secure contracts with lower costs.