Aug 30, 2024

The Rise of Web3 Video Streaming

Web3 video streaming, often shortened to Web3 streaming, runs video hosting and delivery on a decentralized network instead of one company's servers. Independent nodes store and serve the video, you pay with tokens on a public blockchain, and your files stay in open formats that you can move.

Updated Nov 4, 2026: expanded the guide, added how AIOZ Stream works from its docs, replaced an unsourced market figure with a cited one, and added a diagram and FAQ.

Grand View Research valued the global video streaming market at USD 129.3 billion in 2024 and projects USD 416.8 billion by 2030. Other firms reach different totals because they define the market differently. The Ericsson Mobility Report (June 2026) says video made up around 75 percent of all mobile data traffic at the end of 2025.

What limits traditional streaming platforms?

Most large platforms serve video from their own data centers and a handful of content delivery networks (CDNs). That works well on a normal day. The weak points show up when something breaks, when a policy goes against you, or when your audience grows.

Concentration is the first problem. When a large delivery provider fails, every service behind it fails with it. On 18 November 2025, Cloudflare reported that its network began "experiencing significant failures to deliver core network traffic" at 11:20 UTC. Its customers' visitors saw error pages until core traffic largely recovered at 14:30.

Control is the second. On a hosted platform, your channel, your audience and your uploads live under that company's rules. YouTube's Community Guidelines strike policy, for example, says three strikes in the same 90-day period may result in a channel being permanently removed. Moderation has good reasons, but one company decides whether your library stays online.

Cost is the third. Every extra viewer pulls more gigabytes, and commercial delivery is often billed per gigabyte, so your bill grows with your audience.

What Web3 streaming changes

Web3 streaming keeps the parts of online video that already work, such as HLS playlists, adaptive bitrate and an embeddable player. What changes is who runs the infrastructure, how you pay for it and how easily you can leave.

Decentralized delivery

Storage, bandwidth and compute come from many nodes run by independent operators instead of one company's data centers. The player fetches segments from nodes near the viewer, so delivery does not hang on one provider staying up. This brings its own problems: nodes join and leave, quality varies by region, and the network has to check that nodes delivered what they claim.

Open payment rails

You fund your account with tokens from your own wallet, so no card processor has to approve you. Each deposit is a public blockchain transaction that you can look up. Token prices move, though. If a service bills in dollars and you pay in tokens, the exchange rate on the day you deposit sets your credit.

Ownership of the account and the files

For you, the useful part of ownership is portability. Video packaged in open standards such as HLS (RFC 8216) and MPEG-DASH plays in any compatible player, so you are not tied to one vendor's app. Some Web3 streaming services, AIOZ Stream included, still use a normal email sign-up, so check how a service handles accounts before you assume wallet-based identity.

How does Web3 streaming work?

A Web3 stream goes through the same six steps as any online video. What differs is where steps four and five run.

Upload or ingest. For video on demand (VOD), you upload a finished file. For live video, an encoder such as OBS Studio pushes the feed to an ingest server, usually over RTMP. Our guide to decentralized live streaming follows that feed through transcoding and delivery.
Transcoding. The service turns one source into several renditions, for example 360p, 720p and 1080p, each at its own bitrate.
Packaging. Each rendition is cut into short segments, and a manifest lists them: an .m3u8 playlist for HLS or an .mpd file for DASH.
Storage. The segments and manifests are stored. On a decentralized network, they sit on many nodes instead of one storage cluster.
Delivery. When a viewer presses play, nodes close to that viewer serve the segments.
Playback. The player reads the manifest and picks the rendition that fits the viewer's bandwidth. In an example from the AIOZ Stream docs, a viewer at 720p drops to 480p when bandwidth falls near 1.2 Mbps. Once the buffer recovers, playback climbs back to 720p.

Diagram of the Web3 video streaming pipeline in six steps: upload or RTMP ingest, transcoding into 360p, 720p and 1080p renditions, packaging as HLS .m3u8 or DASH .mpd, storage on distributed nodes, delivery from edge nodes near the viewer, and adaptive bitrate playback — The six steps of a Web3 stream. On AIOZ Stream, storage and delivery run on AIOZ DePIN edge nodes.

How does AIOZ Stream handle Web3 streaming?

AIOZ Stream is our platform for hosting on-demand and live video. Here is how it maps to the six steps, based on what its docs describe as of November 2026.

Video on demand: upload and transcoding

You upload through the dashboard or the API, where you create a video object first and then upload the file. You choose the output qualities, from 240p up to 4320p, and the format: the AIOZ Stream Video API supports HLS with MPEG-TS or MP4 containers and DASH with fMP4. When encoding finishes, each video has an HLS URL, a DASH URL and embed links for the player. If your video is already in HLS, you can import it from a URL, and AIOZ Stream copies its renditions as they are, without re-encoding.

The player

The AIOZ Stream player plays HLS and MPEG-DASH with adaptive bitrate. You can give it custom themes and embed it on your site with an iframe.

Live streaming

To go live, you create a Stream Key and a live streaming session in the dashboard, with a title and the resolutions you want. Then you paste the RTMP URL and Stream Key into OBS Studio, PRISM Live Studio or another RTMP encoder. Viewers watch through a public playback URL or the embedded player, and the session's playback link is an HLS URL. For Q&A sessions, auctions or gaming, the dashboard player has a Low Latency Mode (Beta) that cuts the delay between you and your audience. You can also save the broadcast to the archive as a regular video when it ends, or add destinations to restream it to other platforms.

Delivery through AIOZ DePIN

AIOZ Stream runs on AIOZ DePIN. The AIOZ Stream docs say that storage, bandwidth and compute "are provided by decentralized edge nodes, reducing egress cost and improving locality for segment fetches." So steps four and five run on nodes spread across the network instead of in one data center.

Webhooks and analytics

Webhooks send an HTTP POST to your server at each encoding stage: file.received, encoding.started, partial.finished, encoding.finished and encoding.failed. The Analytics API reports plays, starts, ends, impressions, views and watch time, and you can filter the numbers by country, device type, operating system and browser.

Pricing

The AIOZ Stream payment docs list usage-based prices. Storage costs $0.02 per GB per month, billed hourly, and delivery $0.02 per GB of data delivered. Transcoding costs $0.01 per minute up to HD, $0.02 for 2K and $0.05 for 4K. You pay by depositing AIOZ tokens to the wallet that comes with your account. Your credit equals the deposit multiplied by the AIOZ/USDT rate at the time of deposit, so the dollar value of the same deposit can change from day to day.

Frequently asked questions

What is Web3 video streaming?

It is video hosting and delivery on a decentralized network of independent nodes instead of one company's servers. The formats stay standard (HLS and DASH), so viewers use a normal player.

Is Web3 streaming the same as peer-to-peer streaming?

Not quite. Peer-to-peer delivery is one way to decentralize the delivery step. Web3 streaming usually also covers storage on distributed nodes and payment with tokens on a public blockchain.

Do viewers need a crypto wallet to watch?

No. On AIOZ Stream, viewers watch through a public playback link or an embedded player. Only the account holder pays, by depositing AIOZ tokens.

Which protocols does AIOZ Stream use?

The docs list RTMP for live ingest, HLS for live playback, and HLS or DASH for on-demand video.

How much does AIOZ Stream cost?

Storage is $0.02 per GB per month, delivery $0.02 per GB, and transcoding $0.01 to $0.05 per minute depending on resolution. You pay from a balance funded with AIOZ tokens.

Can I stream live with low latency on AIOZ Stream?

Yes. The dashboard player has a Low Latency Mode for interactive broadcasts such as Q&A sessions, auctions and gaming. The docs still label it Beta.

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