Video on Filecoin: exploring the Voodfy project built with Powergate

Videos have quickly emerged as one of the most interesting forms of data being stored by teams building on the Filecoin network. When taken together, streaming and on-demand video consumption make up a huge proportion of total internet bandwidth. At Textile, we are incredibly excited by the innovation that can occur when combining video with the cheap and abundant storage available on Filecoin. Today, we want to showcase one of the earliest projects innovating in the video+Filecoin space, Voodfy.

What is the Voodfy beta?

Voodfy Beta is a powerful and private decentralized video hosting platform. We're building decentralized tools for private video hosting. It's an all-in-one secure streaming solution that gives users control of their content. Using our Video CMS or integrating our APIs it's possible to reach your audience on all devices and monetize your video content in a safe, reliable, and more affordable way.

How did you get interested in Filecoin?

My interest in Filecoin started when Eric Tang from Livepeer told me that it was possible to build a video platform using decentralized storage. The idea to build and offer a product offering transcoding and storage to deliver videos in a decentralized way sounds to me like a dream.

What got you interested in Textile?

The interest in Textile came up when the complexity and the necessity to build a decentralized video platform. It is tough to have all the stuff necessary to store in a decentralized way. Using IPFS/Filecoin with Powergate from Textile enables me to focus on the primary goal of building a decentralized video platform.

What pain point is Voodfy trying to solve?

Currently, people and companies with rich experience use online videos as a strategy to share their knowledge, wanting to monetize them without having a lot of effort with complex video infrastructure and without having revenues hurt by piracy.

Many of these companies and people don't know how or where to start publishing and selling videos without losing control of the content to Youtube or big marketplaces of online courses, for example.

The bigger the audience is, the more complex it is to scale. You need to take care of many things so that in the end, your users can have a great experience watching your videos without buffering. To do this, It's needed to pay expensive companies specialized in content security or hire engineers and support teams to take care of it using a cloud service, such as Amazon.

How does Voodfy use Filecoin to solve it?

We're using Filecoin to be our cold layer storage instead of Google Cloud storage or S3, with Powergate becoming easy to handle.

Filecoin is the right way to store assets, videos, stories, data, memories. Return the data to the people the idea and philosophy behind this that I think that Filecoin will solve it.

Why do you think users would be most interested in using Voodfy?

Using Voodfy you get a more affordable, streamlined video hosting platform that's available to your customers on all their devices. High-quality video with no downtime that's secure and customizable, putting you in control.

What's coming next for the project?

We are working hard to move our infrastructure from Beta to Release. Further, considering our vision of being an all-in-one decentralized streaming solution, we will offer our users an option to have customizable and secure video portals with live streaming (partnership with Livepeer) with an auto-archive option to VOD (stored in IPFS/Filecoin).

Follow Voodfy's progress, ask questions, or contribute to the project using the links below:

• https://twitter.com/voodfy
• https://twitter.com/leeaandrob
• https://beta.voodfy.com
• https://github.com/Voodfy