[Top Builder 2025]: sats.gg

[chdwlch]

🏗️ Top Builder 2025 Application Form to track progress through Round 1 - 3 ~ Currently in Round 1

📝 Instructions

Welcome to the Top Builder competition! Before you begin, here’s what you need to know:

1. Eligibility: Only teams that have been officially selected for Top Builder by PlebLab are eligible to use this form.
2. Detailed Submissions: Provide comprehensive information to assist the judges in evaluating your project effectively.
3. Submission Deadlines: Adhere to submission deadlines for each round to remain in good standing.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 The Team

• Team Name: sats.gg

• Number of Founders: 1

• Team Background: Professionally I'm a software developer working in cloud infrastructure. On the side I build lightning and nostr applications.

• Bitcoin & Lightning Involvement:

  • Participant in the Chaincode Labs lightning seminar
  • Created satbox.tv, Bitcoiners Play Pokemon, Streambrah, sats.gg, L402-HLS
  • HRF bounty recipient for work on human readable bolt12 offers
  • ATL BitLab member

• Origin Story: What inspired your idea?
  I've been interested in live streaming since I discovered Xfire pre Justin.tv / Twitch. I first dipped my toes into video streaming with my video jukebox application called satbox. Satbox was a video jukebox app built with LND's LSAT tech (now L402) and Twitch. Later I decided to ditch Twitch and make my own streaming platform called sats.gg. While building sats.gg I learned about the financial realities of large scale video delivery and this led me to create a new protocol called L402-HLS.

💡 The Idea

• Project Overview: sats.gg is a video streaming platform like Twitch.tv, but integrated with lightning and nostr. The platform uses a video streaming protocol called L402-HLS.
• Website: sats.gg (L402-HLS enabled refactor is currently in staging)
• GitHub: https://github.com/satsgg/sats.gg/tree/l402-hls
• Project Stage: MVP almost complete.
• Supplementary Materials: https://youtu.be/HwvSdAvkM9w

📚 Additional Information

• Additional Links/Info: TODO: Add L402-HLS protocol link

📌 Submission Type

• Initial Project Creation

🚀 Current Project Progress

• Progress Made: Prioritized Top builder task board: https://github.com/orgs/satsgg/projects/2/views/1
• Challenges Faced:
• Future Roadmap of what's next: After the live streaming MVP is finished, my primary goal is to demonstrate an L402-HLS enabled stream delivered via an embed in a social post. I'm not sure if it's possible yet!

⏳ Round 1 Milestone

• Keep in mind that completion will need to be by February 8th, 2025.
• First-round milestone the team has set for themselves:

📝 Submission Complete

• All required information has been provided above.

📅 Top Builder Program Structure

Registration Opens: Monday, October 28th, 2024

• Application: Interested teams apply for Top Builder.
• Selection: Teams will be chosen based on their application. See FAQ for details.

Round 1: January 6th - February 8th, 2025

• Workshops: PlebLab weekly workshops start, available live and online.
• Chat Access: Selected teams join the PlebLab internal chat.
• Mentorship: Begins for teams.
• Project Milestones: Teams are set and judged on their first-round milestones.

Round 2: February 9 - 22nd, 2025

• Team Reduction: PlebLab cuts half of the Top Builder teams. (Only half continued in Round 2.)
• Project Milestones: Teams are set and judged on their second-round milestones.
• Workshops: PlebLab weekly workshops continue.
• Mentorship: Continues.

Round 3: Starting February 23rd, 2025

• Team Reduction: PlebLab narrows down to 5 Top Builder teams. (All will be pitching in Austin.)
• Final Milestones: Teams set final project milestones for the last round.
• Preparation: Teams prepare their pitch in front of judges. Final teams are contacted to come to Austin for Startup Day.

Final Round at Startup Day: March 13, 2025

• Preparation: Teams work on their final pitches at PlebLab.
• Presentations: Final teams present before judges on Startup Day.
• Deliberation: Judges decide during a happy hour.
• Announcement: The winner of Top Builder is announced at Austin BitDevs.
• Celebration: After-party for Top Builder.

[chdwlch]

Dev update:

• Frontend design refactor almost complete
• Initial iframe embed links are working
• Added new sharing dialog
• Video player has been improved
• Making steady progress on Twitter player cards

Should have 2/3 of my embedding/sharing goals complete these week. The third (native hls player in a twitter style nostr client), may be a stretch goal. I might focus on improving the video player as much as possible instead since the Twitter embed is almost working.

[chdwlch]

Update:

• Got sharing to twitter works with the custom lightning video player using twitter player cards
• Did some refactoring to improve meta tags

Goal for this week is to improve player UX more and make progress on the dashboard

[chdwlch]

Update:

• Finished backend code to deprovision the streaming server when the time runs out
• Started improving the streaming dashboard to handle the kind 30311 notes
• Started work on automated payment flows to allow the user to watch and pay with no friction
• Spent most of the week building a webLN enabled cashu browser extension... The idea here is that the extension could inject webLN into the lightning player iframe in the Twitter post. This would enable automated payments and the smoothest watching flow directly on twitter or anywhere the video player is embedded via an iframe (iframes are one way of sharing and watching the videos).

Goals for the next week:

• finish automated payment flows to allow users to watch the video without interruptions
• Get the dashboard to a good enough state so people can start using the service

[chdwlch]

Demo update:
https://youtu.be/VgRCSbap670

In this demo I show the new sharing functionality with Twitter and raw iframes.
Twitter sharing is done via Twitter player cards and Twitter meta tags. The player still needs some sizing adjustments here. I also still need to test it more on mobile since Twitter will open the mobile version on sats.gg in a simulated browser.

The iframe demo shows how the player would work for users who might want to post the videos on their blogs or their personal websites like Ghost, Substack, SquareSpace etc. The iframe is just a single html element that you can paste wherever you want.

I still need to show the player inside of a nostr kind 1 note on a Twitter style nostr client.

Automated payment flow is in progress.

[chdwlch]

Update:

• made an architecture diagram for my backend
• browser extension is 90% complete for a demo. I also figured out how to inject the webLN provider into iframes
• made zap chat messages more sexy
  Goals for this week
• finish streamed payments with my browser extension (including inside iframes)

[chdwlch]

Recording an end to end demo of the latest state of the project.
Service is almost ready to go live. Still finishing the automated payments and the dashboard.
https://youtu.be/cUVSelhrMZU

[chdwlch]

Update:
Was out for a week visiting family. Back on the grind now.

Browser extension work is pretty much complete:

• added branding and named it Sendy
• switched to chrome port based messaging to keep background service worker alive
• finished styling on popup and sidepanel

For sats.gg I am currently finishing the dashboard which is the last major feature to go live.
I'm also mocking up ui designs changes based off feedback I have been getting.
If I have time I'm going to test sharing on Facebook and LinkedIn.