The Theta Network:
While searching for something to write, I stumbled upon the Theta network. The goal of the Theta network, is to bring about a decentralized delivery network compared to the centralized CDNs that many streaming sites like Twitch, Youtube, etc, work on. The primary tokens that are exchanged are the Theta Token and TFuel. For more information on its operation, refer their website, www.thetatoken.org
Down the Rabbit Hole:-
After searching for more information, other than their whitepaper, I came across www.theta.tv. It is a streaming website similar to Twitch where one can watch well known Esports gamers like FaZe and NICKMERCS. A quick check on the Twitch channel of NICKMERCS, did not show any signs of him streaming on theta.tv. Giving Theta.tv the benefit of the doubt, i decided to dig further and i did find his him, but was offline and did not seem to be very active on the site, when compared to his Twitch channel where he was currently streaming. The theta token and the theta.tv is owned by a company called Theta Labs. Their website was rather informative, as all that you are greeted with are just two buttons wiht a lot of styling.
A quick google search of Theta Labs shows that it is a subsidiary of Sliver VR Technologies. If some may remember, Sliver was a founded in Sep 2015 by Mitch Liu and Jieyi Long. The company was quite active, one news article reporting them raising $9.8M in a Series A round with various big wig investment companies with notable tech names such as Samsung and Sony.[1]
Coming back to the point, The theta.tv allows users to enjoy streamers content, while on certain streams(seems like a majority) users' unsed upload bandwidth is used to share with connected peers with an incentive of TFuel. Both the Theta token website and the theta.tv sites have website designs where it is difficult to gain definite answers. It almost seems like they wish to make information very difficult the obtain.
The thing that struck me mildly disturbing is that the TFuel that you earn on theta.tv, cannot be withdrawn at all. You can use the TFuel to tip the streamers or buy their merch but not Withdraw them. The Tfuel token is a PoS coin and cannot be mined, but a small amount is needed to start a node. that has to be sent to a wallet address for "verification".
Are We At The Bottom?
I feel that this article is getting to long and feel like I must split into parts to (shamelessly) maintain user engagement and also not take up too much of their coffee time. I know this article could be poking people in ways they might not like but i request you all take this article in a lighter vein. Feel free to comment down below, on where you think I might be wrong, as all of this is just based on my preliminary research on the The ThetaNetwork, and I feel that people who are invested and interested in crypto has the right to get the right info in their hands. Please await the next article, that will be out in the next few days.
[1]https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/23/sliver-tv-raises-9-8m-to-make-esports-spectating-less-passive/