Web-monetized Multimedia 2.0 - Progress report

Project Update

Last week we published the first version of the library with the first set of web components including sample media and documentation. Please take a look on https://eqlabs.github.io/wmm-components/ - there is still a large amount of work in the pipes. ☺

We now have ¾ of the project behind us. So far we’ve been working on video, audio and plain text components. The last bit of the project involves fine tuning the components and documentation. We are also digging into some future use cases for web monetization. That’s going to be fun, and it would be super cool to get ideas from the Community as well. Please leave a comment.

Progress on objectives

Our focus for web-monetized-multimedia is to build a library of Web Components enabling users to build and deploy multimedia content with wider possibilities in monetization. We believe that leveraging web monetisation to cover the different medias more widely enables a plethora of new use cases and areas to utilize. This would also encourage more developers to start implementing components, contributing to open source – resulting in wider adoption amongst end-users as well.

The objective of our project is to promote web monetisation through a platform-agnostic library of streaming multimedia web components, and to show the extended possibilities of the API with hosted demo websites and blog posts that guide the community for applying the technology into their projects.

Key activities

So what have we been doing to make this happen?

We started the project by taking a closer look at what is going on, what has been done and how should we approach this.

Cinnamon Video was a good project making sense what is “monetizing content” all about. And it works as a good “Web Monetized multimedia for Dummies” explainer for various stakeholders.

As an example of a good & modern documentation site, we used Shoelace as a benchmark. https://shoelace.style/.

We started by building the backend component that verifies the transactions and sends the media to the browser only if a required amount of value has been transacted. This gives content creators more security in controlling their creations and allows modifying the user experience based on the value of transactions.

Figuring out the best way to implement backend verification was one of the bigger hurdles during our research phase. We started experimenting by connecting to interledger network using moneyd, but later opted to using receipt verification instead. Interledger livenet connections are currently permissioned because of fiat gateways, and thus using webmonetization.org's receipt verifier enables a much simpler implementation for newcomers. Still, more advanced users can install their own receipt verifier service and get even more security and robustness in their system if they so choose to.

When creating the code for the project we had quite a clear plan for technologies being used. The main ones being Web Components in the UI (for video, audio and text components) and node.js backend for serving the media and verifying payments with the recipe service.

To allow easier control of the requirements to show the media, we’ve implemented features like “price per minute” for video and audio and “price per word” for text content. Of course these are somewhat advanced features since the main way of making Web Monetization payments at the moment is using a Coil wallet, which controls the amount of XRPs being sent. Still, the idea is to be future proof for the time when Web Monetization is a widely accepted standard and there are many wallets with different amounts of payments being made.

One nice feature with keeping track of the payments is to give new users free “tokens” into the system, and giving them access to the media freely until they run into a paywall and are instructed to install the Coil wallet.

Communications and marketing

Most of the comms so far have been done for the Web Monetization community. We have written three blog posts so far prior to this.

Intro: Web-monetized Multimedia
https://community.webmonetization.org/wmmultimedia/intro-web-monetized-multimedia-2ii9

So, you are watching videos, where the money goes?
https://community.webmonetization.org/juhaviitala/so-you-are-watching-videos-where-the-money-goes-1lij

Enabling the content creators
https://community.webmonetization.org/wmmultimedia/enabling-the-content-creators-2f0j

What’s next?

We still have plenty to do with the video, audio and text web components. One of the most important aspects of the project is proper documentation. We have been using Docusaurus for documentation and it’s been super useful. https://v2.docusaurus.io/docs

Last part of the project is super exciting, we are really going to mess around with the future possibilities for web monetization and come up with some crazy future use cases. There are already quite a few we’ve been playing around with. Cloud gaming, virtual worlds, AR-contents, live streams, you name it.

What community support would benefit your project?

As we are mainly concentrating on bridging the web component library with the receipt verification, we haven’t been able to focus on the user experience side that much. What we have found out is that it would be important to get more wallet options. What kind of wallet projects are going on? What is happening on that side?

Please throw out ideas for future web monetization use cases!