Lately a lot of people have asked me about Lbry. I decided to write this post to share my experience with this platform.
What is lbry ?
It's quite tricky to define what lbry is. At first sight it's a video platform but if you dig a bit deeper, you realize that you can actually share a wide variety of content like text, images, sound files, pdf, csv, comic books and others.
This is the definition of Lbry given on the Lbry FAQ:
First and foremost, LBRY is a new protocol that allows anyone to build apps that interact with digital content on the LBRY network. Apps built using the protocol allow creators to upload their work to the LBRY network of hosts (like BitTorrent), to set a price per stream or download (like iTunes) or give it away for free (like YouTube without ads). The work you publish could be videos, audio files, documents, or any other type of file.
What should be added here is that Lbry is a blockchain based technology and it comes with it's own currency: LBC.
My first experience with Lbry
I discovered Lbry about a year ago thanks to my friend @ph1102. He was speaking about the platform in his blogs and I decided to have a look. I learned that you could earn tokens simply by watching a video every day and also from following people and such things. There is a reward tab, that allows you to earn LBC tokens as a content consumer. So I started out consuming and earning tokens on a regular basis.
The youtube shock and how I started to upload my stuff to lbry
I've been making a lot of tutorial videos for my different online businesses. I normally posted them on youtube and embedded them in my website. One day I had kind of a shock when youtube told me that one of my videos has been erased because it was against their TOS. I had a landing page and now the video there was missing. I remembered Lbry and uploaded the video there and managed to embed it into my site again. From this moment on I stopped uploading videos on Youtube and used Lbry instead. At the beginning there were some quality and speed problems and I solved them by uploading lower resolution videos.
Earning tips from videos
The funny part was that by uploading my videos on Lbry, I started to earn tips. I believed that these tips were sent by other users and was very thankful. I happened to watch some videos later and I realized that these tips were actually given by the system of Lbry. The amount of these tips was defined by the number of views that my videos would get. The more views a video would get, the more tips I would receive. A kind of light bulb went on in my head and some ideas sprouted from there. I started to embed these videos also into my blog posts and I earned even more tips.
What can you do with the LBC token?
All the tips that you get are actually kind of staked on your videos. If the system tips a video, this tip will be linked to this video and it will have the effect that it will climb higher in the search engine of Lbry and Odysse. You can also stake LBC tokens on your videos to help them to be found in a better way. The tips and the stakes can always be canceled and relocated to other content. This is a great way to boost your latest videos. The more you boost a video, the more views and tips you will get.
Odysse is a more modern front-end for Lbry
If you don't want to stake your tokens, you can also exchange them on the Bittrex exchange into USDT or BTC (Check-out this tutorial how to do it)
The financial side of Lbry
For me Lbry filled a need. It gave me the possibility to host my videos for my sites and the security that nobody would take them away. Joined to that, it actually generated a kind of passive income. My LBC tokens started to accumulate and I always used them to increase my stake on the videos. I spend very little time on Lbry and hardly interact with content. In spite of that my LBC accumulated quite nicely. Today I have about 2'100 LBC staked on videos on the platform. This corresponds to a value of roughly 230 USD. I believe this is quite nice when you think that this platforms delivers a useful service for me and in addition pays me for doing so!
I would love to invite you to join the Lbry platform. If you join the platform using my referral link, you will actually get your first 8 LBC tokens (= 0.8 $) once you completed verification:
https://lbry.tv/$/invite/@achim03:e
Let's connect ! You can find me on these platforms: