I remember we tested a P2P delivery system a while ago, but we didn't notice any improvement. Heck, some streams were actually worse when there was only a few viewers.

But this is a completely different approach. The delivery is achieved using a standard CDN for smooth playback. The part that is really decentralized here is all the GPU power used for transcoding. It is built on the Ethereum blockchain. The "miners" are basically allowing the network to use their GPU power to transcode streams, and in return they get ETH and LPT (Livepeer Tokens).

This allows us to scale at a fraction of the cost of setting up traditional ingest servers, while delivering better performance. There's also a few cool things like the clever load balancing that automatically switches you to a different ingest if the one you're connected to is performing poorly.

Honestly this is just like playing with a shiny new toy.