Introduction
Content sharing as we know it is at its watershed moment. Torrents as a means of file sharing have been repeatedly attacked by government agencies owing to regulatory requirements and so called “copyright” infringements. Through setting up barriers of varying natures information dissipation across cultures, geographies and social classes have been largely limited, permitting only the rich and the elite to access information or content that should be available and inclusive of everyone. The recent take-down of what.cd spelt trouble for most private trackers that were singular, central repositories of information pertaining to torrent downloads. Although the files themselves were stored across decentralized mediums, the singular access point take down brought down along with it over a decade’s worth of carefully curated content that was described to be an Alexandrian library for the average bibliophile.
While content sharing is often frowned upon has come with its upsides. Firstly, it permits people with limited resources to access media that were otherwise hidden behind huge barriers - both financial and technological. Due to the high amount of licensing and legal requirements involved with releasing new shows or movies in such markets, there is often no way to ‘legally’ access them. Second, it is highly resistant to censorship. In a decentralized network, there is no single point of failure making taking it down next to impossible.
Napster reinvented the way humanity shared content and taught businesses that teenagers with the right insight could take over record label executives if they built products that brought major value additions to the end user. Granted it ended with an ugly lawsuit, the core principals stand to be of utmost value and sense in the age of Bitcoin. What if, individual content could be rewarded for, while being hosted across multiple devices and any middleman involved in the process could be kicked out? What if individual record labels did not control what geographies said content was released into or money remittance businesses did not eat into the profit of the individual artist? We aim to combine the promise of P2P and decentralized networks with the convenience expected from more modern streaming services. Our system is built on rewarding curators of content for the effort they put into populating the site with the most relevant and in demand media while ensuring that there is no single point of failure or legal liability for the site itself which could result in it being taken offline. Our goal in the long term is to onboard the creators themselves and enable them to interact with a global user base with the power of the blockchain surpassing local regulations and licensing requirements.
Pure Vidz vs Traditional Streaming
MegaUpload boasted over 50 million unique users every day at its peak. While it was famously shut down, that hasn’t stopped the popularity of similar services. Notable examples include VidTo.me, VidUp, VShare and many more. These sites are used as file mirrors for content which is very often removed and deleted due to DMCA take down requests. To access them users must use an indexing site such as CouchTuner, 123Movies and countless other examples. These sites are filled with advertisements, broken links, popups, countless file mirrors and confusing menus tricking users into clicking fake advertisements.
Pure Vidz's most direct competition in terms of users would be these more traditional streaming sites as their main users are afraid of torrenting worried they may get a virus and are unwilling to install any 3rd party software. Not having to worry about if a video will work or not due to standardized file requirements, approval process and decentralized video delivery ensures that the long term reliability of Pure Vidz is miles beyond what any of these sites may try to offer. Our strict advertisement guidelines it also solves the confusion of "which fake play button is the real one". Pure Vidz also offers a huge bonus over any of these streaming sites, the ability to easily discover content. Through suggested content, streamlined searching by genre or category and the ability to create and share playlists or even be informed when a movie or show you are excited for becomes available, it ensures that user retention of the site out performs any of our competitors.
Pure Vidz vs Traditional Torrents
Since the early 2000’s, torrenting has been an incredibly popular method of file sharing and a hotly debated research topic. The technology allows for resilient networks with fantastic scaling and no single point of failure. DHT (Distributed Hash Tables) allow for incredibly resilient networks that scale seamlessly as the number of nodes are increased and suffer no single point of failure.
Services such as ThePirateBay and EzTV generate tens of millions of users every month and have proven incredibly difficult for hostile governments to shut down or block. Pure Vidz offers the same traditional functionality of a torrent indexing service but takes the technology multiple steps further by requiring no 3rd party torrent programs/plugins, no confusion when sorting through releases worrying about malicious or fake content or even encoding compatibility and most importantly makes torrenting so easy that anyone can do it. With easy to understand, responsive categories, suggested content and advanced search features, finding what you want to watch is as simple as could be. While advertisements will definitely play a role in Pure Vidz, all advertisements must meet the site’s guidelines meaning no malicious or misleading content, no intrusive ads (video, sound, animation, popup/under) and no adult content. Suggesting the site to a child, grandparent or conservative friend should never even be a question, it should be something everyone can safely and easily make use of.
Content Sharing: A Decentralized Future
With the rise of modern privatized streaming sites such as Netflix or Hulu, many have claimed that peer2peer file sharing will be a thing of the past. What that argument does not account for is that these services are often unavailable, severely limited or completely unaffordable in many regions of the world. From a recent article in forbes written on how decentralized platforms offer unique challenges to private companies facilitating the sharing of content, one could draw out a pattern wherein individuals in different parts of the world preferred the torrent equivalent over streaming through a private site
If the numbers hint towards anything, it is the fact that as internet speeds improve rapidly, the tendency of the average individual to go for higher quality streams that are a repository of entire series or old shows would increase. If private businesses are to acquire the licences to share the same it would directly increase the price of the service thereby limiting it to a select few in the upper strata of society that can afford to pay for the same. Therefore, torrents are not something that governments can wipe off. It will remain as long as the average individual yearns for good quality content without having to pay for heavy prices. The promise of torrents is not solely free access. It is also well indexed, checked by thousands of individuals around the globe and of much higher quality than private streams. Due to the same, we see an opportunity in combining existing decentralized tokens with a decentralized platform for private streams for the purpose of creating an ecosystem that rewards uploaders and enables viewers around the globe to access good quality content. Torrents have fallen out of favor due to the simplicity of new modern era platforms such as Netflix. With Pure Vidz tailored towards ease of use, we'll be able to leverage the best of both worlds.
Bounties Ecosystem
Bounties are a great way for users of the website to influence what is added and to ensure that content is added at a healthy rate to the service to keep users entertained and the site running smoothly. To help with this, there are actually a number of types of bounties each of which work in slightly different ways. Contributors to the site may always view a list of available bounties ordered by their value. When these requests are filled and a moderator confirms the content is working, properly formatted and properly tagged then the bounty is split between the person who submits the torrent (75%), the moderator who reviewed it (12.5%) and the development fund (12.5%).
All users who have registered an account on the website will have a trust value based on how accurate their submissions, reviews and ratings have been in the past. Users with high trust ratings may be offered moderator status. Moderators are unable to review their own submitted content and will be removed and blacklisted if they incorrectly approve fake/misleading content.
User BountiesAny user on the website may place a bounty for items not currently indexed. These bounties are combined between users increasing the visibility of content that has been requested by multiple users. To place these bounties, users will search for an item that they wish to be added to the site and then specify how many VIDZ tokens from their balance they would like to use. After a confirmation window the bounty will be placed and the VIDZ removed from their account. If a bounty is not filled within 30 days then the bounty is canceled and the tokens are returned to the user’s web wallet.
Global BountiesTokens in the development fund are accumulated through user submitted bounties, buyback programs and VIP membership renewals. Every time the fund reaches a certain threshold a new global bounty will begin. Unlike user specified bounties, global bounties assign a fixed number of coins to be distributed among all content added to the site during a specific time period. For example if a 7 day 100,000 VIDZ global bounty begins then at the end of the 7 days these tokens are split equally among all content submitted and approved to the website during that time period. Movies are valued at a 10:1 ratio to television episodes for obvious reasons.
These global bounties act as a way to healthily re-distribute the currency among users who are actively submitting content to the site and allows large amounts of new content to be made available at key times of the year. For example we would be able to trigger specific global bounties encouraging users to upload christmas movies near the holidays or summer blockbusters during the summer.
VIP RequestsWhen a user purchases VIP status, 60% of the coins are sent to a burn address with 40% being assigned to their request ‘weight’. VIPs may request as many new items to be added to the site as they wish without spending any VIDZ with our system automatically assigning a bounty based on how many items they have been requested and their current request weight. The math behind request weight takes into account how many items the user has requested in the month, the bounties already existing on those items and their perceived scarcity.
For example, requesting a newly released summer blockbuster will increase the visibility of the bounty but will not add a significant amount of VIDZ to it as the likelihood of it being submitted regardless is very high and the number of other bounties placed on it are already significant enough.
Technical Details: How does it work?
The 4 key pieces of technology behind how Pure Vidz work is WebRTC, WebTorrents, HTML5 features and indexed metadata.
WebRTC is a collection of communication protocols that allow web browsers to not only request real time information from back-end servers but allow the browser to relay information to other users. This enables bi-directional network communication making it easy to build things such as video conferencing, file transfer, chat, or desktop sharing without the need of either internal or external plugins.
Quoting directly from the authors of WebTorrent,
WebTorrent is the first torrent client that works in the browser. YEP, THAT'S RIGHT. THE BROWSER. It's written completely in JavaScript – the language of the web – and uses WebRTC for true peer-to-peer transport. No browser plugin, extension, or installation is required. Using open web standards, WebTorrent connects website users together to form a distributed, decentralized browser-to-browser network for efficient file transfer.
HTML5 brought with it the video tag which supports:
- Near Instant Playback
- H.264 Video Codec
- AAC/MP3 Audio Codec
- WebVTT Subtitles
This is an important break through as prior to the video tag in HTML5 to play video in the browser required the use of plugins such as Adobe Flash.
Metadata is an important part of any database relying site. Metadata is additional information that can be used to better describe a file (or something) and its relating subjects or content. In the context of a video streaming site, meta data typically consists of things such at the title of the video and tags associated with it. For example, if you consider a movie's genre such as "action" that's a tag which can be considered meta data.
Through elaborate analysis done through TheMovieDB and TheTVDB we can determine things such as back drop images, synopsis, release date, genre, actor/director/cast information, etc. More important, we can determine things such as what Youtube and Netflix do which is suggested/related content by looking for other videos or content that have similar meta data. This allows a user to find other content they're likely to enjoy quite easily.
Technical Details: Domain Routing
Domain routing is one of the techniques we'll be employing to ensure that our service is always online. The way this works is you have one central domain for example purevidz.net which then uses some form of client-side code to look-up what the newest domain is for the current version of the service.
There's a few ways this can be done and one way is using the Bitcoin blockchain itself. The way this is done is using the Bitcoin op code known is OP_RETURN
OP_RETURN is a script opcode used to mark a transaction output as invalid. Since the data after OP_RETURN are irrelevant to Bitcoin payments, arbitrary data can be added into the output after an OP_RETURN. Since any outputs with OP_RETURN are provably unspendable, OP_RETURN outputs can be used to burn bitcoins. Currently, the default Bitcoin client relays OP_RETURN transactions up to 80 bytes, but does not provide a way for users to create OP_RETURN transactions.
- Bitcoin Wiki
Suppose we have some address that we own the private key to. This means that we are the only ones able to broadcast a transaction from said address. Knowing this, we can then perform transactions from our staticly defined address to any other address we own and include an OP_RETURN of the newest website. For example, "purevidz234.net" is well under the 80 byte restriction.
Our client-side code or router can then look up all transactions from our defined address via an api such as blockchain.info and look for the most recent transaction. From this, it can determine the OP_RETURN value of said transaction, and then route you to the value of it. All of this can be elegantly done with a little bit of Javascript.
Technical Details: Anonimity
For users who simply with to use our site as an index to obtain the magnet link to then download the torrent themselves rather then stream it in the browser, we will provide a stripped down *.onion version of the site. Onion domains are to be used with TOR:
.onion is a special-use top level domain suffix designating an anonymous hidden service reachable via the Tor network. Such addresses are not actual DNS names, and the .onion TLD is not in the Internet DNS root, but with the appropriate proxy software installed, Internet programs such as web browsers can access sites with .onion addresses by sending the request through the network of Tor servers. The purpose of using such a system is to make both the information provider and the person accessing the information more difficult to trace, whether by one another, by an intermediate network host, or by an outsider.
- Wikipedia
However, for users who have ISPs who monitor their activity and enforce anti-torrenting policies we can only reccomend you use a VPN for anonimity. While this site uses WebRTC which will likely look significantly different to ISPs and currently result in no traffic shaping, we cannot gurantee it will stay this way. We will be aiming to partner with VPN providers to allow users to purchase cheap VPN subscriptions.
Finances
Site AdvertisementAdvertisements on Pure Vidz must conform to strict guidelines both in terms of service/site content and in the format of the advertisement itself. Ads must not be misleading, malicious or compete with the services being provided by Pure Vidz. The format of advertisement will be simple CSS styled html links meaning no animations, videos, sounds, popups or popunders. The purpose of these restrictions is to ensure that users are not tracked or put in danger by 3rd party advertising partners and to make sure the site remains clean, quick and functional for all users.
Targeted AdvertisementTargeted advertisement slots consist of paid or referral based ads targeted to the content you are currently watching. This could be posters, shirts, boxed sets or other merchandise that expand the functionality of the site. These ads may not be directly purchased as it would result in the ability for advertisers to more easily track users leaving our website and would cause too many advertisement submissions to do our due diligence in approving. By placing these ads ourselves for approved services it allows us to strengthen their security and relevance to ensure conversion rate is as high as it can be.
VIP MembershipsWhile the site will be free for all users (registered and guest), VIP memberships will unlock a number of unique features. VIP status is temporary and may be unlocked by using VIDZ tokens, through site promotions or through a fiat gateway.
- No site advertisements
- Free content requests
- Customizable RSS feeds
- Customizable content notifications
- Alternate website themes
VPN ReferralsDepending on the copyright laws in the country a user is accessing the service from, a VPN ranges from "recommended" to "necessary". As part of our site we will aim to educate users on what a VPN does for your anonymity and why it should be used when accessing p2p resources. As part of this process, we will be including promoted links to the PureVPN service. Their referral program offers initial commission on new signups as well as recurring commision on accounts that continue after the first month. This will offer the site sustainable long term profits while at the same time informing and protecting our users anonymity.
PureVPN's referral program generates approximately $10 for each new signup and $3.50/month recurring. This means that for each 1000 VPN referrals who remained subscribers for 12 months, the site would generate up to $48,500 (1,000 users * $10 + 1000 users * $3.5/mo * 11 months) in earnings.
VIDZ Buyback and BurningVIP Earnings - Any VIP memberships purchased with fiat gateways will be allocated to buying back VIDZ tokens from exchanges. The tokens received from these purchases will be treated in the same way as if the VIP had been purchased through VIDZ. 60% will be sent to a burn address with the other 40% being allocated to the user’s request weight for the month. Unused coins from the request weight will be transferred to the development fund.
Referral and Advertisement Earnings - All funds earned from referrals, advertising and other fiat based partnerships are dedicated to three major tasks: site costs, site development and the coin buyback program. A report will be published each month validating funds have been allocated as promised and will also include various metrics showing the growth and profitability of the site.
- Site Costs - 15%
Every month 15% of the total fiat profits are allocated to the site maintenance fund. This fund is used for server hosting, domains and other expansions of the networking services.
- Development - Variable %
To ensure that the developers are active in the long term and are heavily invested in the price of the VIDZ currency, the profits from advertisements are proportional to the amount of coins held by the organization. This includes the dev fund, advertisement funds and the personal fund of the developers themselves. As more coins are acquired from the buyback program, the portion of fiat earnings that the developers receives increases. If the service holds 10% of the total VIDZ supply then they only receive 10% of the fiat profits of the site. Auditable information will be published monthly to verify transparency.
- Buyback - The Remaining %
All remaining fiat profits are routed into the buyback fund which aims to purchase VIDZ from exchanges. Coins received from the buyback program are routed into the development fund (25%), a private holdings fund (25%) and a public burn address (50%). The purpose of this breakdown is so that coins are always being redistributed through the development fund to provide global bounties or social marketing campaigns, to increase the scarcity of the coin by burning them and to increase the stake the developers have in the price of the coin. As the private holdings fund grows, the amount of fiat allocated to the buyback program is lowered.
User Acquisition
Our main methods of advertising involves viral marketing campaigns and word of mouth. Some parts of our approach includes...
- Torrent and crypto communities will play a crucial role in acquiring users as they become informed of our services
- Bounties for torrenting groups including our site in their release notes so that when you click the torrent on other sites it will say "Watch it instantly at purevidz.net" as part of the description
- Facebook groups for shows/movies letting them know they can watch for free with no downloads on our site. University students are always quick to jump on the bandwagan of the next quickest easy method of sharing content and as many university and colleges tend to have frosh groups for their particular graduation year, it's easy to see how Pure Vidz can spread
- Real world campaigns where we give users templates for flyers to print out. Take a picture of you posting it at your local campus or community center to claim VIDZ
- Youtube trailers or interviews can let people know they can watch the movie/show for free with no downloads on our site
- Twitter/Facebook/Signature campaigns gets users to advertise our service through their social media network. Those who participate are then rewarded with a VIDZ bounty
- Traditional media press releases regarding the site and how it differs from other torrent/streaming sites.
