Home » Business » Rad NFTV live streaming platform using BSV as ‘our ledger, our hard drive’
The chief marketing officer of the live streaming platform Rad NFTV wants the world to know his group was doing NFTs before NFTs were NFTs.
Day 2 of the BSV Global Blockchain Convention in Dubai brought a presentation from Brooklyn Earick, CMO of Rad NFTV, on the intriguing subject of “Live Streaming & Blockchain.” Earick got things off on a self-deprecating note, stating that he “didn’t know there was going to be a makeup room [backstage], so take all this in, cuz this is as good as it gets.”
Earick got serious by relating Rad’s origins as Littlstar, a distribution platform for immersive content—virtual reality, 360° video, and no user-generated content, just big studios (Warner Bros, Disney, Fox, Sony, NBC, you name it)—long before YouTube got into the 360° game.
The massive size of VR files forced Littlstar to rethink its operations. A couple of the team had been “playing around with Bitcoin and blockchain” since its early days, while a couple of their engineers had peer-to-peer (P2P) experience at file-sharing site Limewire. Soon enough, the thought emerged: “why don’t we combine these things?”
The result was a protocol called ARA, which featured “P2P technology, blockchain to verify licenses and a token for rewards.” Littlstar users were encouraged to participate as peers by helping to host/distribute VR content, earning tokens in the process, which led to “a lot of great feedback from partners and people in the ecosystem.”
But the VR industry soon plateaued, and with less content coming to the platform, Littlstar “had to make a decision as to how to keep things exciting.” To differentiate their offering—and gain access to devices such as PlayStations and Android TV—they “started to dive into NFTs and creators in general.”
They realized that ARA, with its P2P systems and smart contracts, “was really NFTs before NFTs were NFTs, so we had a deep understanding of how we could do this and the value we could bring to creators in general.” Littlstar’s network, which is now approaching half-a-billion devices, meant “we kind of had the whole funnel of ‘set your own terms, release it and we’ve got the distribution for you.’”
Now rebranded as Rad, Earick said they’ve identified that the NFT offerings of platforms like OpenSea, Nifty Gateway, and Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) “have nothing to do with video; it’s monkey JPEGs and a few other things.” Lessons learned from the immersive video world have come in handy as Rad sought to mint 8K resolution movies.
But soon, creators were coming to Rad wondering, “what’s up with these gas fees, the gas prices are too high.” Earick joked that his response was “I don’t know, ask [U.S. President Joe] Biden,” but the creators’ point was taken.
“We built ARA as this cross-chain manager and it’s time to make it truly cross-chain, so we started exploring some of the other chains and that’s when we started to dig into BSV,” Earick said
Earick said Rad’s creators “don’t care what’s under the hood, they want it to work, they want it fast, they want it cheap.” Rad met with the nChain team, and Earick said they discovered BSV ticked all the boxes: “inexpensive, fast and it worked.”
Rad has since decided to employ BSV as “our ledger, our hard drive” to be “completely transparent with all our creators.” Whether Rad creators publish content on Ethereum, Solana, or another blockchain, “we’re going to reconcile all that on BSV.”
As creators look to publish ever bigger files, Earick believes BSV will quickly stand out from the blockchain options when it comes to fees, noting that the choice is “do you want to pay thousands of dollars or pennies?”
Earick said BSV has been “a big step forward for us because this allows us to go back to our partners and say ‘we have the infrastructure to scale this now, like enterprise levels and you’re not going to have to wonder what gas fees are going to be, not going to have to wonder what’s clogging up the network that day.”
Watch the BSV Global Blockchain Convention Dubai 2022 Day 1 here:
Watch the BSV Global Blockchain Convention Dubai 2022 Day 2 here:
Watch the BSV Global Blockchain Convention Dubai 2022 Day 3 here:
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