Theta Infinity Studio

Theta Infinity Studio was my solo entry to the Theta Network Hackathon in Q3 2021. More than a decade earlier I'd worked at a streaming company, full of ideas I never got to ship. Theta felt like the excuse to finally try them.

The pitch was simple. Streaming is eating media, but we barely use what the technology can actually do. So I built a decentralized media CMS from top to bottom, on a fully decentralized stack.

Two products, one system

The Studio is a React CMS for managing video projects. It stores everything on OrbitDB and IPFS instead of a normal database, and you sign in with Metamask. No central server owns your content.

The Player is a lightweight embed you drop onto any page. It reads from the same decentralized backend and paints an interactive layer on top of the video.

The parts I'm proud of

Real-time analytics with no server. Views, countries and languages, for both on-demand and live video, streamed peer-to-peer through GunJS and drawn live in the browser with D3. Live streams even keep a per-minute history and a realtime viewer counter.

Interactive product placement. Hit record, then track a product with your mouse as the video plays. The position is saved moment by moment and wired to a real shop through Origin's DShop, payments included.

Decentralized ads. Ad slots served by the AdEx Network rather than Google.

Live overlays you can throw at viewers mid-stream. Polls, a screen-shake "rumble", and Lottie animations, all pushed in real time through Streamr so every player reacts at once.

What it proved

The point was never a finished product. It was to see how far you could get building real, interactive media on a fully decentralized architecture, with Metamask, IPFS, OrbitDB, AdEx, DShop, Streamr and GunJS all talking to each other. The honest answer surprised me: pretty far.

I came back with a smarter version for the Q1 2022 hackathon, this time with smart-contract content sales. That thread kept pulling, and it is exactly where Mediagram came from, the content tool I am still building today. Theta was the seed.

The original hackathon write-up and demo video are still up on Devpost.