Baidu-Owned Video Streaming Giant iQiyi Taps Public Blockchain for Performance Boost

One of the world's largest video platforms, iQiyi, hopes to improve its user experience after joining forces with a public blockchain that enables bandwidth sharing.

The freshly inked deal will see the Beijing-based video platform use the peer-to-peer infrastructure from New Kind of Network (NKN) to help boost buffering speeds and reduce energy consumption and network congestion, NKN announced in a press release on Tuesday.

The joint effort marks a step forward in the development and interoperability of two emerging technological innovations, blockchain and edge computing, NKN said.

"NKN's main focus is networking infrastructure, in order to enable sharing of bandwidth and Internet connectivity," said Zheng "Bruce" Li, co-founder at NKN, told CoinDesk in an email interview.

"Edge computing is critical for video streaming, game streaming, high-speed autonomous driving, AR/VR and IoT, and blockchain can play a significant role in it," Li explained. Used to improve response times and save bandwidth, edge computing uses distributed systems to brings computation and data storage closer to site of demand.

During an April 1 trial, the teams noted a major increase in caching savings, a type of short-term computer memory in which information is stored or hidden for easy retrieval at a later date.

iQiyi was founded by internet giant Baidu in April 2010 and has since grown to well over 500 million users and nearly six billion hours of time spent on its service each month, according to Wikipedia.

See also: 3 Web Giants That Could Be Decentralized on a Blockchain

The video platform is now integrating with NKN's blockchain in order to utilize its "micro-hosting network management" for deploying and managing third-party content delivery network (CDN) software running on the platform.

CDN is a system of distributed servers that provide web content to a user based on their geographic location, as well as the host site of the webpage and the content delivery server.

NKN's blockchain uses a proof-of-relay (PoR) mining algorithm that randomly selects a small number of fixed data packets as "proof" before sending that data to other nodes for payment and reward. The firm said its architecture has potential to scale to millions of nodes and already has up to 20,000 nodes in operation around the world.