Imagine I would have a video streaming service (I dont have and will not have…) which would allow customers to rent videos to watch.
I could do it by uploading videos as private files and when someone rents it, route the stream throught my server to the customer.
But would it be feasible to implement a way to use my private keys to open the stream directly from nodes to the customer, so I would not need to route it throught my server?
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Just wondering how easy would it be to create a service on top of Autonomi so a customer could just send some fraction of ANT and get some streamed music or video etc for the coins.
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I’m not sure, but I think even if you found a way to mask the key in the first place it would be possible for the user to reconstruct the datamap of the media file, because they would be downloading the chunks of which the file consists.
Maybe your best shot would be a proprietary, closed app that would handle the whole process. But I guess even then it would probably be possible to analyze the apps traffic to find out which chunks are loaded.
Maybe just “sell” it instead of “rent”. If the price is low enought, piracy would not be a big problem.
If you only wanted to ‘rent’ the vides, giving them any keys is going to give them permanent access.
Ofc, anyone who rents a video can always record it, so maybe that is fine.
That said, if I was netflix, I’d consider uploading 99% of the frames to autonomi, then keeping the missing ones on regular servers. The client would then splice the two sources together. My bandwidth bill would also drop by 99%.
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Yea, in todays world perhaps the rental model is now outdated. I know its being pushed harder and harder and subscription services to this and that. But that is just the companies trying to move away from buy and own to pay us forever for that.
Let Autonomi bring back the pay once and own. Media rentals on Autonomi will not work great since people will bypass it just like they bypassed Microsoft’s MSN back in the mid 90’s
If you really have to have something that works for most and that would be to store the decryption key in a scratchpad record for your rental and change it when the rental expires, that way the decryption has a time limit after which the rental expired.
Of course there are ways around it just like there are ways around other digital rental services. But it’d work for most people.
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Well, if there were one more mode for upload “pay-for-download”, it would give some very interesting possibilities.
Let’s say you want to publish a book. You just upload it with “pay-for-download” mode, then add it to some directory. Someone finds it and then could download it by sending defined amount of ANT to the owner address.
But does this idea conflict with the princibles of the whole Autonomi?
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Frankly, I myself see there some bad side effects, this might not be that good idea 
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In one word - Yes
Directly against the one which talks about downloads are always free
But does not say that data is always free, there is potential for selling data. Just the network will never charge for downloads
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I would setup a lightweight web server to act as your member server and control streaming rights. It proxies back to a microservice to do the video fetching so the user can’t see the files directly.
For each video file I’d chunk it into small HLS segments and upload them separately to Autonomi. I’d then create a list of the XOR addresses for the video segments in order into another file in CSV or something, and upload that file to autonomi.
Then when a member rents the video, you stream it by having the server download the CSV of the segment order and use that to download the segments on the fly and allow for range requests to jump around/rewind/fast forward.
You could improve this by setting up a caching system or CDN to serve up frequent chunks so the performance is better.