Introduction

Is there anything better than YouTube or Twitch for live-streaming? Yes, let’s introduce novon.tv, the decentralized live-streaming service built on NKN’s global communication network. What does that mean? It is entirely free, no need to watch 6 minutes of commercials, no servers to connect to, and the content creators get to keep all their income without sharing with “platforms”.

Mutsi, developer of novon.tv, hosted the first ever live-streaming session with NKN co-founders on November 12th, 2024. And after this successful debut, we had a quick chat with Mutsi.

A fireside chat with Mutsi

Hi Mutsi, you have been around NKN for a long time. 🙂 But please introduce yourself a bit to our community.

Hello! My name is Mitchel, but most people both online and offline call me Mutsi.

I’ve been a game developer pretty much all my life, I started at around age 12 learning programming from a book I got from the library. Eventually I got into financial software development, my latest job in that field was working with a team on writing a high performance cryptocurrency exchange matching-engine.

I got involved with crypto in early 2017, and with NKN somewhere early 2020, since I had picked up quite a bit of software skills throughout the years I started tinkering with NKN and to date have put out quite a few projects. The latest of those projects being novon.tv. I went full circle and currently work on developing my own game.

What spurred you to develop novon.tv?

First and foremost I really enjoy building interesting applications with NKN, it opens many doors that are otherwise impossible or very hard to open. I started with noice, a real-time communication app, but had a lot of trouble getting the latency low enough for natural conversation.

Eventually I figured that for live streaming latency is not an issue, the actual latency with novon is actually lower than competitors. So I took what I had learnt from noice and started building novon instead. I was surprised just how well it can perform, not just in quality, latency but also the scale at which a single individual on a home PC can broadcast leveraging this network.

What are the main technical challenges you experienced during developing novon.tv?

Having built projects with NKN before, I already had a fairly firm grasp of how to transmit data through the network, this started with Surge P2P file sharing, and later Noice the realtime voice/video communication app. novon.tv is built upon the experiences of those prior projects, and so the biggest technical challenges did not lie with NKN technology, but rather with video. I did not know anything about encoding, decoding, transcoding, streaming and all the ins and outs of video and live broadcasting. I learnt those concepts while I was building novon and so it was also a great learning experience for me.

Are there any parts of NKN that helps or hinders your development?

It helps tremendously having a network that can distribute data so conveniently and reliably as NKN, without having to have any kind of server is something I’ve never seen before. The SDKs that NKN provides are very easy to use and you can have secure, anonymous, serverless communication between any kind of end user device in just a few lines of code. It is exactly the power of this NKN network that has enabled me to build novon in the first place, this project was impossible to do without a decentralized network that can scale to the size that NKN can.

It enables anyone to reach a bandwidth throughput that rivals large scale centralized data centers. Otherwise even with a really solid commercial fiber connection you simply would not be able to come close to the same throughput, resulting in a maximum of perhaps 10 or 20 viewers at high quality video, with novon you can reach multiple orders of magnitude larger audiences.

How about your other NKN related projects (nstatus, novio, noice)?

So here’s a rundown of the things I’ve built over the years. I’m probably forgetting some projects!

nTipBot, this started as a telegram tip bot that enables anyone in the NKN telegram channel to send and receive NKN tips, over the years this has grown to include many more features, such as community management, network statistics reporting and more.

nTracker, this is another telegram bot but this runs as its own channel, where every day at UTC midnight it reports interesting statistics about the NKN network for that day.

nStatus, a webtool to easily check the status of a node by the ip address, with beautiful visualizations.
nTrack, building upon the on-chain data gathering abilities of nTracker bot, this is a high performance blockchain explorer for NKN.

Mempool, during development projects with NKN I often wanted to see if my transaction was within the memorypool, how many transactions were in the pool, and when my transactions were confirmed in real time. That’s why this project was built.

Surge P2P, this was my first big network transmission related project with NKN, this is a decentralized p2p file sharing app. This was a joint effort by rule110. It works sort of similar to torrents, but where torrents expose your IP address for connections, here data is transmitted over NKN, anonymously and securely. Additionally it’s not only a download client, it’s also a way to host, distribute, and find files. A one stop shop.

Noice, noice is a realtime browser communication application, you can audio call, video call, and screenshare. All securely and anonymously over the NKN network.

What are the plans to get people to use novon.tv? How can the NKN community help?

Streaming platforms are by nature also social platforms, this means that they suffer from the same kind of problems for new players on the scene. Everyone is already on social platform X so there’s little reason to go to social platform Y. However with novon.tv I think we have a unique value proposition. First of all you do not concede ownership of your content, you are the sole proprietor of your own streams empowered by the NKN network, there are no ads, you make the rules, you distribute your content, you take all revenue.

Given these unique selling points the main plan should be to raise awareness. Educate people about what novon can do, help people onboard, and also don’t try to compete with existing platforms but rather suggest streamers to stream to their regular platforms, but additionally also to novon at the same time. It’s built on the exact same backend technology as traditional platforms so streaming works the exact same way. A part of your viewerbase might want to watch on novon instead of your regular platform, for anonymity, to circumvent ads, so that their financial contributions are paid to you in full, or simply for the lower latency and potentially higher quality streams.

Try novon.tv

You can try novon.tv on your own, and feel free to join our Discord channel for support!
And you can watch the replay of novon.tv’s first ever live streaming event.