Payments

Per Pixel Pricing​

The value of payments is based on the number of pixels of video transcoded. Orchestrators advertise a price per pixel off-chain. Broadcasters filter and select orchestrators based on a maximum price per pixel that they are willing to pay for transcoding.

The video profiles requested by broadcasters will impact the number of pixels transcoded. A higher number of video profiles or more complex video profiles will require more pixels to be transcoded and also require more payments.

Probabilistic Micropayments​

Payments are implemented using a probabilistic micropayment protocol.

Broadcasters send "lottery tickets" to Orchestrators in exchange for transcoded results. Each "lottery ticket" is defined with:

• a face value: the payout to the orchestrator if the ticket wins, and
• a probability that the ticket will win.

Each ticket is treated as a micropayment worth the expected value of the ticket (calculated as: face value multiplied by probability that the ticket will win).

Orchestrators set a required ticket expected value (EV) which defines the value of work an orchestrator is willing to do before requiring a ticket. For example, if the ticket EV is set to 1000 gwei, then the orchestrator is willing to do 1000 gwei worth of work before requiring a ticket. The default ticket EV in livepeer is set to be reasonable (1000 gwei) so at this time orchestrator operators are encouraged to just use the default because using a non-default value could lead to broadcasters excluding an orchestrator from selection due to the broadcaster's max ticket EV (which has a default that is set based on the default ticket EV).

Orchestrators will redeem winning tickets on-chain, to receive the face value of tickets.

Orchestrators can disable this mechanism and advertise a constant price by setting the -autoAdjustPrice=false flag.