Media Network: New CDN for Privacy & Freedom

Content delivery has seen dramatic growth over the last decade, with large publishers typically distributing the load among geographically dispersed edge-servers to improve end-user performance. A massive increase in demand for these services has fostered many centralized content delivery networks or CDNs, as we know them today.

CDNs have been around since the 90's. They have grown in size and added several features, but the underlying mechanism has remained essentially the same. CDN vendors operate hundreds of physical servers (edges) across the world that cache content and direct traffic to the nearest physical server.

A typical CDN solution.

These centrally-organized networks have proven effective in handling this task. However, to sign up and use the service, CDN vendors require content publishers to over-provision the needed bandwidth in order to handle peak demand and establish expensive and complex long-term business relationships. They also require and store personal information like full names, addresses, and payment methods, thus compromising privacy and limiting freedom of expression.

The violation or encroachment of privacy discourages one of the activities that give life to the Internet: content creation. Ultimately, we see acts of censorship as something pretty “normal,” making de-platforming an everyday topic on mainstream media.

The technology available today can be used to eventually replace these hundreds of large-scale and centrally controlled servers with thousands of individually controlled edges, like dedicated servers, VPS, or even personal computers.

State of the Market

Today, most active developments and networks try to obfuscate the base problem with different workarounds that only degrade the service and don’t offer a real advantage. Even if some of these projects are decentralized at their core, they still face heavy centralization at the edge when consuming the protocol.

Platforms using centralized CDN solutions at the edge.

So far, “blockchain decentralized CDNs” solutions do not allow third parties to use their services. No tangible solution is offered to media platforms, developers, or content publishers with massive audiences. Indeed, some of them have ongoing partnerships with huge corporations validating their network and running nodes, ultimately going against their censorship-resistant narrative.

So how does it work?

Media Network is a decentralized protocol that establishes a marketplace for web services, empowering individuals to access and utilize network resources based on fluctuating demands for delivering data to end-users. Additionally, this marketplace enables providers, who possess server expertise, to offer their services and earn income from them. By leveraging this protocol, individuals with unused bandwidth resources can seamlessly distribute content without relying on trust assumptions or pre-authentication prerequisites.

The economic model is an elegant design, where part of the fees charged to those who want to use the CDN service is rewarded to network participants in exchange for resources. The remaining portion of the fees is used to buyback-and-burn MEDIA, giving everyone an incentive to hold the token. Every participant is required to stake MEDIA before joining the network.

Providers earn MEDIA tokens when they sell services to clients through the marketplace. Apart from being a medium for incentive alignments, MEDIA is a governance token that serves to vote on the protocol’s direction and carry out its development without central control.

Media Network helps decentralize the “last-mile” content delivery for end-users.

Benefits of the protocol

• Community governed
• Censorship-resistant
• Anonymous and blockchain-based, without personal data or centralized accounts.
• Anyone can be a provider or a client, and help scale the network.

Service Providers / Content Publishers

• CDN Service (scale any existing infrastructure without limits)
• No contracts, KYC or long-term business commitments.
• Reduce costs by up to 99% using Media PeerPool
• Set up your infrastructure with Media Server or any other similar software and broadcast / share your content without limits.

End-Users

• Earn MEDIA by sharing your unused bandwidth resources, helping the network scale.