Access levels
Community Gateway
The community Gateway atdream-gateway.livepeer.cloud is operated by the Cloud SPE for development access. It accepts unauthenticated requests and routes to the active Orchestrator set.
Managed Gateway provider
A managed Gateway provider gives you an API key and a Gateway endpoint. Requests are authenticated, rate-limited per your tier, and the provider handles Orchestrator routing and payment settlement.Authorization header.
When to use: production applications where you want no infrastructure overhead and accept the provider’s pricing and routing decisions.
Self-hosted Gateway
Running go-livepeer in broadcaster mode gives direct network access. You control which Orchestrators receive your jobs, what price you pay per unit, and how authentication works.
When to use: your monthly API spend is material, you need to specify which Orchestrators handle your jobs, you need the inference path to stay within your own infrastructure, or you need a custom auth/billing model.
Self-hosting decision
The natural path for most developers: start with the community Gateway, build and validate your application, move to a managed provider for production, then self-host as usage grows and the cost or control trade-offs become worth the overhead.
There is no hard threshold at which you must switch. The signals are cost, control, and data residency.
Orchestrator session lifecycle
When a Gateway receives a job, it selects an Orchestrator from its candidate list (explicit-orchAddr or network discovery), sends a GetOrchestratorInfo request, negotiates capabilities and pricing, and routes the job. For live AI (live-video-to-video), the session persists for the stream duration; the Gateway routes all frames to the same Orchestrator until the session ends or the Orchestrator fails.
For batch jobs, each request may go to a different Orchestrator. The Gateway applies stake-weighted selection with price filtering for each request independently.
Session management is automatic in go-livepeer. For custom Gateway implementations, the livepeer-python-gateway reference implementation exposes the session lifecycle through OrchestratorSession and SelectionCursor classes. See alt-Gateways for the Python Gateway architecture.
The local Gateway setup walks through running a self-hosted broadcaster node step by step. The production checklist covers what to verify before moving to real traffic.