FiberHead – Livepeer Grant Proposal

[fiberhead]

Please describe your project. Start with the need or problem you are trying to solve with this project. Describe why your solution is going to adequately solve this problem.

FiberHead_Livepeer_Grant.pdf

Link to public GitHub repo (if applicable)

No response

Link to demo website (if applicable)

No response

Please describe in more detail why this proposal is valuable for the Livepeer ecosystem

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Please describe in details what your final deliverable for this project will be.

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Please break up your development work into a clear set of milestones

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Sum up the total requested budget across all milestones, and include that figure here. Also, please include a budget breakdown to specify how you are planning to spend these funds.

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Specify your team's long-term plans to maintain this software and upgrade it over time

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Please describe (in words) your team's relevant experience, and why you think you are the right team to build this project. You can cite your team's prior experience in similar domains, doing similar dev work, individual team members' backgrounds, etc.

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Who is your target user group? How do you plan on getting your users to use this?

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How did you learn about the Livepeer Grants Program?

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Was this project started at a hackathon or another web3 event? Which one?

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Please include any additional information that you think would be useful in helping us to evaluate your proposal.

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Do you consent to using "Powered by Livepeer" watermark on your application?

• Yes
• No

[stronk-dev]

Just to confirm since the proposal is a bit vague on the details of the media pipeline: this is simply a wrapper around Livepeer Studios' API, right?

Also wanted to flag that earlier this year, the FrameWorks SPE was already comissioned to work on a Livepeer-powered video SaaS, including legal entity, B2B onboarding + SLA's, direct Livepeer Gateway integration, and including the full media pipeline (ingest, video processing, stream replication / load balancing, edge delivery).

[fiberhead]

FiberHead: Multi-Tenant Streaming Framework built on Livepeer

Thank you for your message and for taking the time to review our proposal. We appreciate the Livepeer team's interest in FiberHead and the opportunity to clarify how our architecture extends beyond a simple API wrapper. Below we’ve provided a concise overview of what FiberHead does, how it builds on Livepeer’s core technology, and how it differentiates itself through enterprise-grade multi-tenancy and developer tooling.

FiberHead is building an enterprise-grade, multi-tenant streaming framework powered by Livepeer. Our goal is to make decentralized video infrastructure accessible to SaaS builders and media companies by combining Livepeer’s transcoding network with a complete B2B and B2C platform layer. Unlike a simple API integration, FiberHead provides tenant management, isolated company databases, role-based permissions, and built-in billing with Stripe. Developers can use our open-source frontend SDK and REST APIs to create their own streaming or content applications on top of Livepeer — secure, scalable, and production-ready. By using Apache APISIX as our enterprise API gateway, every tenant and company receives its own authenticated, rate-limited environment with HMAC-signed requests. Ultimately, FiberHead aims to become the fastest and most reliable way for developers to launch Livepeer-powered SaaS products without rebuilding infrastructure from scratch.

Comparison: FiberHead vs. Simple Livepeer API Wrapper

This table highlights the architectural and functional differences between a simple Livepeer API integration and FiberHead’s multi-tenant SaaS platform. It shows how FiberHead extends the Livepeer ecosystem by adding developer experience (DX) tooling, enterprise-grade security, and data isolation.

Dimension	Simple API Wrapper	FiberHead (Multi-Tenant SaaS Layer)
Core Function	Basic calls to Livepeer Studio API (create/list streams)	Complete SaaS architecture: tenants, users, projects, billing, and developer SDK
Gateway / Security	Basic API key authentication	Enterprise Apache APISIX gateway with JWT + HMAC signatures, subdomain routing, per-tenant rate limiting, and signed webhooks
Data Model	Single shared database or flat JSON structure	Per-company PostgreSQL database separation (system DB + company DBs for compliance and scalability)
Multi-Tenancy	None	Hierarchical model: System → Company → Tenant → User
Tenant Permissions & Roles	Not supported	Built-in TenantRole and TenantPermission models for granular access control (e.g. manage_users, view_streams, manage_videos)
Billing	None	Integrated Stripe billing with plans, subscriptions, and APISIX-secured webhooks
Frontend / UI	Minimal dashboard or none	Open-source React/MUI frontend + SDK for developers to build their own branded streaming apps
Auth / Users	Manual API key management	Unified authentication (JWT + Refresh Tokens) and secure API key issuance per company/user
Media Pipeline	Direct Livepeer Studio calls	RTMP / WebRTC ingest → Livepeer Studio/Network transcoding → HLS playback → project-scoped assets
Developer Experience (DX Layer)	None	Developer sandbox, CLI, API docs, webhooks, and modular React components
Operations / Scalability	Single instance	Horizontally scalable Go backend + APISIX gateway; independent per-company database migrations
Compliance / Security	Shared environment, higher data exposure	Hard isolation, GDPR-ready schema, HMAC request validation, and audit logs
Extensibility	Fixed codebase	Modular APIs for projects, streams, VOD, AI analytics; extensible via plugins and webhooks

Summary: Unlike a simple wrapper, FiberHead is a developer-ready SaaS framework with real multi-tenancy, database isolation, tenant-level permissions, and a full DX layer built on top of Livepeer’s decentralized infrastructure.

[stronk-dev]

Great to be arguing with Codex/Claude/GPT-5/your favourite flavor of AI...

Anyway, so you're building a SaaS platform around a SaaS that integrates with Livepeer... So you'd be dependent on Studio for everything, which means if there's any outage all of your users are affected and there's nothing that FiberHead can do to fix it.

Your table contains a lot of stuff that Studio already offers (like the dashboard, billing, Kafka powered event streaming, and more) and throwing a random 'RTMP / WebRTC ingest → Livepeer Studio/Network transcoding → HLS playback' in there is exactly the details I am asking about... Which one is it? Studio or the Livepeer network? What is powering this ingest and playback? How are you balancing load? Or is it using Studio for ingest/delivery after all?
A 12-week $15K project can't offer a full media pipeline... Unless you're offloading it to a cloud service.

[fiberhead]

Clarification on FiberHead Architecture, Media Pipeline, and Scope

Thank you for the detailed feedback — let me clarify the architecture in a precise way to avoid misunderstandings. We agree that a 12-week, $15k grant cannot (and should not) attempt to rebuild the media pipeline that Livepeer Studio already provides. This is exactly why FiberHead focuses on the SaaS layer that Studio does not offer.

1. Media Pipeline (MVP) — Strategic Use of Livepeer Studio

For the MVP, FiberHead intentionally builds on Livepeer Studio’s battle-tested ingest, transcoding, and delivery pipeline. This is a strategic design choice: Studio already offers the most reliable media infrastructure in the ecosystem, and duplicating it would dilute effort without adding value.

By relying on Studio’s proven media layer, FiberHead can focus engineering resources on the parts that Studio does not provide:

• multi-company → multi-tenant → multi-user architecture
• per-company PostgreSQL database isolation
• RBAC (TenantRoles, TenantPermissions)
• white-label tenant portals and subdomain routing
• customer billing via Stripe & resource tier limits
• APISIX API gateway (JWT, HMAC, rate limits)
• projects, streams, VOD, clips on the application layer
• developer SDK and open-source frontend templates

In short: Studio handles the media pipeline; FiberHead provides the full SaaS platform layer on top.

2. We Are Not Duplicating Studio Features

Some earlier wording caused confusion, so here is the corrected separation.

Livepeer Studio provides:

• RTMP/WebRTC ingest
• transcoding and media processing
• HLS delivery and global load balancing
• Studio’s own billing (for Studio usage)
• a single-account developer dashboard
• internal Kafka pipeline (not exposed to external developers)

FiberHead does not replicate these capabilities.

FiberHead provides what Studio does not:

• full multi-tenancy (system → company → tenant → user)
• per-company database separation for compliance and security
• user onboarding, roles, permissions, and RBAC
• Stripe billing, company plans, resource limits
• white-label portal with subdomain routing
• developer-facing API gateway (APISIX) with JWT + HMAC
• project organization, VOD, clips, analytics (ClickHouse planned)
• open-source frontend templates for builders

Users cannot get these features by “running the open-source Studio stack” — that stack does not include billing, RBAC, multi-tenancy, subdomains, or any SaaS application layer.

3. Kafka & Event Streaming

To clarify: Livepeer Studio’s Kafka pipeline is internal and not exposed to developers. FiberHead is not interfacing with Studio’s Kafka topics.

Instead, FiberHead provides its own event system on top of Studio’s webhooks:

• stream state updates
• usage events per company
• VOD and asset lifecycle events
• project-related events

These events are delivered through FiberHead’s own APIs — not through Studio’s Kafka.

4. Roadmap vs. Grant Scope

To avoid misunderstanding about scope:

• Phase 1 (Grant Scope, 12 Weeks): FiberHead uses Livepeer Studio exclusively as the media backend and focuses entirely on SaaS-layer features.
• Phase 2 (Later): Optional direct integration with the Livepeer Network (e.g. WHIP ingest, orchestrator selection) for advanced tenants.
• Phase 3 (Enterprise): Optional failover or hybrid setups with providers like Akamai or Cloudflare for customers needing additional redundancy.

These future phases are not part of the $15k grant — they are long-term options for enterprise expansion.

5. Positioning Summary

To summarize:

FiberHead is not a competitor to Livepeer Studio.
Studio handles ingest, transcoding, delivery, and load balancing.
FiberHead provides the multi-tenant SaaS application layer, developer tooling, billing, RBAC, and company/subdomain isolation that Studio does not offer.

Our goal is to expand the Livepeer ecosystem by making it dramatically easier for developers and media companies to build production-ready streaming platforms on top of Livepeer’s media infrastructure.