DubT contract-driven livestream NFT

DubToken allows streaming creators to both fund unique performances and mint stream-derived NFTs through a contract-directed media service.

Lead has 21yrs of building functional, distributed software at Amazon, Apple. Partners are leaders in music and content design.

Summary
A distributed, fair, and in-chain marketplace for audio and video content is being built (Theta, Livepeer) but has many obstacles including copyright infringement detection, storage, provenance, and shared contracts. While we wait and see, there are opportunities to skirt these technology gaps and offer new sources of revenue to performing artists building atop NFT technologies and existing streaming platforms. In fact, there may be opportunities to re-value live performance by minting "live" NFTs from rare live content (versus refined content that requires heavy post-production e.g. nearly all released music).

Solution
DubToken creates digital marketplace based on livestream content and integrates with existing platforms like YouTube and Twitch. It consists of:

1. Primary tokens that initially fund and hold value for any livestream
2. Secondary (derived) tokens which are minted from timeslices of livestream content
3. DubToken media service (DTMS) that executes minting commands of secondary tokens based on metadata linked with primary tokens. This service is "stream middleware" that seamlessly intercepts the live feed and broadcasts to livestream platforms.

Primary tokens provide an investment or funding mechanism for the stream. Secondary tokens function as unique artist "merchandise" or live event tickets. Initially, secondary tokens may only be time slices of the stream. Short slices can become image or gifs made available offline. Arbitrary time slices may become secondary streams made available to secondary token holders

Integration

DubToken builds on existing platforms and has simple adoption model. Nearly all live streamers (including news, infotainment, …) broadcast their local content to a platform using the ubiquitous OpenBroadcastSoftware (OBS). Rather than stream directly to an end platform, artists register with DubToken portal and direct OBS to stream to their DTMS instance which relays to their preferred platform(s). While DTMS is integrated with live platforms it can launch to custom endpoints supporting private, token-authorized streams. This is important to support both unique live content for specific token holders (e.g. back stage pass) and delivery of content to large audiences outside of major platforms.

DubToken can be adopted by artists in two ways:

1. Registering an account with the DubToken HQ website and deploy a hosted DTMS
2. Deploy an artist-managed DTMS using the DubToken core library and service templates on github

By supporting an initial HQ portal, DubToken relieves artists from managing distributed infrastructure.

Ideally server costs linked with an HQ account are handled via the smart contract, however this may be out of scope for the initial offering. In fact, pre-authorization of server fees per hour may be necessary to deal with scaling for private streams. Fortunately, the primary use case is platform-integrated streams; this use case requires few cloud resources per stream and should not require that we model hosted costs for auto-scaling. (TBD we are still investigating solutions within the ecosystem that avoid any offchain payment overhead.)

The token
It's possible that DubToken supports multiple token economic models; however we envision two:

1. Concert model: 1-11 primary tokens are minted and auctioned before the stream event. An "arbitrary" number of secondary tokens can be minted from the stream. Primary token holders take revenue share determined a priori by the artist. Secondary tokens function as a) access to private stream or b) NFT merchandise and can deployed differently by the artist (whether they stream to a platform or privately).

2. 24/7 model: the artist can choose to release up to 10 primary tokens over time using a schedule, where each primary token may have its own revenue share percentage of secondary tokens.

Sales/Auctions

Initial auction of primary tokens would be handled by artists directly, via established gateways, or via DubToken Gateway (private gateway is a V1 reach goal). Secondary tokens are auctioned via platform-integrated bots or said gateways. Sale of any token incurs 10% fee and minting fees handled via smart contracts.

Challenges

• Latency is fundamentally important to maintain stream quality. Its critical to both evaluate different DTMS implementations and provide signals to artists when stream quality issues occur e.g. is DTMS dropping frames or happening upstream?

• Selecting and minimizing dependencies to other, in-flight NFT components is critical to execution.

• Ideally backend implementation provides an abstraction layer that supports later migration to an onchain tech stack. It may be difficult to predict onchain requirements.

V1 Roadmap

1. Backend prototype & load testing (2-3w)
2. Token, Dub DSL, and smart contract implementation (1-2mo)
3. Core DTMS library and self-hosted documentation (2-3mo)
4. Limited alpha offering for self-hosted DTMS (2mo concurrent w 5. 6.)

1. Platform-integrated support only focused on secondary token sales
2. Manage adoption of 4 artists

V2 Roadmap (out of scope for F5)

1. HQ portal and limited ABI (1mo)
2. Bot implementation using ABI (2-3w)
3. Private stream support, limited beta, and testing period (1mo)
4. PR cycle / launch (2-3 weeks)

Success metrics

1. Diversity of artists by end of alpha and beta periods (qualitative e.g. # of categories / # of artists).
2. Weekly active platform-integrated users - demonstrating broad adoption
3. Monthly private-stream events - demonstrating "commercial" adoption

Funding

25000 of funding is portioned to support 4 artists during alpha phase. N.B. an additional 70000 could fund the scope for V2.

Cross-over use cases

1. Podcasts
2. Journalism
3. Infotainment
4. Generative audio / video