What is Theta (THETA)?
What is Theta and how does it work?
Today‘s live video streaming is of poor quality according to the developers of Theta. Especially in undeveloped countries. This is because of the Content Delivery Networks (CDN) lack reach, which causes video re-buffering and high load times in some parts of the world. Almost every video that is shared today is available in 4K. Viewers demand the best, and want to see those videos in 4K, 8K or even better quality, like VR.Normally a video creator posts his video on a platform like YouTube. When someone wants to see the video, he will need to make a connection with the server of YouTube to render the video. This can be a problem and take a lot of time when the CDN lacks reach in that part of the world. The problem is actually that the video is only available from 1 server. A centralized server.
Developers of Theta wanted to fix this problem by making videos not only available from one centralized server, but by offering them in a decentralized network. Theta is creating a peer-to-peer network (P2P) as it is running on a blockchain. People who participate in Theta, offer their unused bandwidth for video caching and relay-nodes. This will improve the quality of the video and makes them smoother to watch. By this way, even people in undeveloped countries with a CDN that lacks reach can watch videos in 4K, 8K and VR.
Theta is, as said, using a P2P network to improve the performance and quality of videos. This can be done because the network of Theta consists of different users with different types of hardware. So, there is a lot of variety, which makes the network always work. The hardware of users (so called nodes) in the network can also be used as caching nodes. This makes it possible to relay the streaming to viewers that are geographically closer to the nodes that is storing the video the viewers want to see. The users of the network can also pull the video stream from other nodes instead of relying on content delivery networks.
In the end, Theta wants to reduce the costs of CDNs by 80%. This is based on the lack of need to maintain expensive data centers that are built anywhere in the world. These datacenters take a lot of space and costs a lot of money, that won‘t be needed anymore after Theta succeeds.
Theta Fuel
Why would somebody share his unused memory and bandwidth with others so they can view videos? That‘s a question the developers of Theta also asked to themselves. They wanted to stimulate people to share their memory and band-with for the Theta network by creating a Theta cryptocurrency named Theta Fuel (also known as TFuel). Participations get Theta Fuel when they participate in the network.Theta started as an ICO. There is a total supply of 5 billion Theta Fuel coins, and Theta has a marketing cap of $48.146.889 in October 2020. The trading of Theta is particularly popular in Korea but can be traded anywhere in the world.