Blockcast

Don’t miss the convo between Omar Ramadan and Tom Trowbridge on the DePINed Podcast & DePIN Day pod! How is Blockcast building the Helium of CDNs? And what’s Omar’s personal journey to founding Blockcast? Tune in to find out!

We announced some big news today! Blockcast has raised $2.85M led by Lattice Fund. The round also included participation from Protocol Labs, Finality Capital Partners, AllianceDAO, Zee Prime Capital, RW3 Ventures, and angel investors such as Anatoly Yakovenko, founder of Solana. It's exciting to pull back the curtain and let the broadcast and streaming industry know there is a new player on the block. But it's also important for us to keep explaining exactly what we are trying to do. Content delivery networks (CDN) are the backbone of internet infrastructure. Without the capacity provided by these massive global networks, the internet we know and love today, the internet that gives us streaming video and game downloads and immersive experiences, wouldn’t really be possible. But the capacity is finite even as demand is growing. And only a handful of companies control that infrastructure. What we want to do is decentralize the process of content delivery by enabling ordinary people to participate in that delivery. This is not peer-to-peer. Blockcast is leveraging multicast and the SVTA's Open Caching specifications to create a decentralized content delivery network. Integrated into that is a Web3 framework that rewards people for distributing content to their community from their Blockcast node. Finally, Blockcast hopes to pull in all of that capacity into an Open Capacity Marketplace where network operators, content owners, OTA broadcasters, CDNs, and Blockcast users (as part of a Blockcast Network) can form contractual relationships to deliver content. We are very excited about this raise which gives us a lot of runway to get key technologies finalized and deployed. In fact, there will be some announcements coming soon which will enable you to pre-order a Blockcast Node so that you can help deliver content (and have a better streaming experience in your own home as well). Read more about the fundraise (and our mission) here:

We announced some big news today! Blockcast has raised $2.85M led by Lattice Fund. The round also included participation from Protocol Labs, Finality Capital Partners, AllianceDAO, Zee Prime Capital, RW3 Ventures, and angel investors such as Anatoly Yakovenko, founder of Solana. It's exciting to pull back the curtain and let the broadcast and streaming industry know there is a new player on the block. But it's also important for us to keep explaining exactly what we are trying to do. Content delivery networks (CDN) are the backbone of internet infrastructure. Without the capacity provided by these massive global networks, the internet we know and love today, the internet that gives us streaming video and game downloads and immersive experiences, wouldn’t really be possible. But the capacity is finite even as demand is growing. And only a handful of companies control that infrastructure. What we want to do is decentralize the process of content delivery by enabling ordinary people to participate in that delivery. This is not peer-to-peer. Blockcast is leveraging multicast and the SVTA's Open Caching specifications to create a decentralized content delivery network. Integrated into that is a Web3 framework that rewards people for distributing content to their community from their Blockcast node. Finally, Blockcast hopes to pull in all of that capacity into an Open Capacity Marketplace where network operators, content owners, OTA broadcasters, CDNs, and Blockcast users (as part of a Blockcast Network) can form contractual relationships to deliver content. We are very excited about this raise which gives us a lot of runway to get key technologies finalized and deployed. In fact, there will be some announcements coming soon which will enable you to pre-order a Blockcast Node so that you can help deliver content (and have a better streaming experience in your own home as well). Read more about the fundraise (and our mission) here:

Blockcast was featured on the latest episode of Proof of Coverage Podcast. We dive deep into the challenges streaming giants face with CDN infrastructure and explore how decentralized tech is changing the game. Give it a listen! https://lnkd.in/e5xr8Zhm

Hey everyone, happy Friday ?? ?? ! Our CEO, Omar Ramadan, just shared some exciting insights at IETF 120 about our latest thinking on transparent multicast CDN. Check out the full recording here: https://lnkd.in/e7snR9dd Context: this is a talk at IETF 120 Multicast Backbone Deployments (MBONED) Working Group. https://lnkd.in/e6KsbxRt ? Some key takeaways: Streaming and downloads are putting a huge strain on ISP networks. Delivering high-quality content at scale is hard! ?? We propose 4 architectures to tackle the scaling challenges: 1?? Multicasting: One-to-many distro 2?? Edge caching: Bringing content closer to users 3?? Open Caching: Open standards for CP/CDN/ISP collaboration 4?? Capacity Marketplace: Aggregating capacity via a unified interface The challenges with multicasting are as much about business as they are about technology. For multicast-enabled services to thrive, we need a broad multicast-enabled network to start with. ?? We, at Blockcast, are set to overcome ISPs' biggest bottleneck with crypto-enabled open multicast CDN. ?? Ending with a quote from Mbone's wiki page: "Since the operators of most Internet?routers?have disabled IP multicast due to concerns regarding bandwidth tracking and billing, the Mbone was created to connect multicast-capable networks over the existing Internet infrastructure."

Blockcast was featured on the latest episode of Proof of Coverage Podcast. We dive deep into the challenges streaming giants face with CDN infrastructure and explore how decentralized tech is changing the game. Give it a listen! https://lnkd.in/e5xr8Zhm

What is an????????? ???????????????? ??????????????????????? Read our latest blog post from Grant Member Blockcast to learn how an open marketplace helps?streamline #contentdelivery, especially in reaching audiences in rural or less connected regions where traditional CDNs don’t peer with local ISPs. https://lnkd.in/gM8XPbXK #transparency #trust #CDN #SVTAOpenCaching

Company logos are tricky things. Many try to encapsulate everything about the company's ethos and feel like they include the kitchen sink. They are often messy and difficult to understand. Some logos take on the characteristic of the company over time as people associate the image with company without it being overly complicated. Think Nike or Microsoft. With Blockcast, we recognized that what we are trying to do is big picture stuff. It can be complicated to explain (although we are slowly fine-tuning that messaging) and has a lot of moving parts. That's why, for our logo redesign that we excitedly launched a week ago, we focused in on a key aspect of our approach: empowering over-the-air broadcasters, like ATSC 3.0 stations and mobile operators, to contribute their datacasting capacity for content delivery. The stylized "B" represents the often-used partial concentric rings of the Wi-Fi icon while the blockiness (especially the little square in the lower left corner) indicates the nature of what we help deliver through OTA datacasting channels: bits. In the coming months we will reveal animated versions of the logo that punctuate how the wordtype and "B" (which will become our bug and hopefully become a recognizable object within the industry) encapsulate not just those OTA and bit elements, but the entirety of what Blockcast is trying to accomplish. We'd love to hear your thoughts on this logo. Just like Blockcast is trying to involve the community in the content delivery chain, we would like the community to be a part of our company growth and evolution as well.

It's always interesting to hear about how startups begin. Sometimes those origin stories us nuggets of wisdom that can help us in our own lives. Sometimes the stories reveal things about the underlying mission of the company and make us realize that not all corporate endeavors are driven by capitalism. And those stories can make us laugh, make us cry, make us reflect on our own origins. Without further ado, meet Omar. He's the founder of Blockcast. In Part 1 of his origin story (because the best stories come in parts), Omar talks about how his life led him down the path to Blockcast. From his early childhood, where his uncle fostered his love for engineering and computers, to attending U.C. Berkeley where he found the opportunity to explore network capacity and content delivery, to Facebook, and then to Blockcast, Omar's story reminds us that the fortunate events which shape our lives sometimes aren't all that apparent until we have a chance to look back on them. "I felt an immense sense of gratitude for the opportunities that stemmed from having access to the internet, and a sense of responsibility to build infrastructure and foster others with the same access."