Viewo – an Israeli step up from YouTube

They don’t call it the Start-Up Nation for nothing. Israeli start-up Viewo could revolutionize how we share videos online, as the platform offers seamless and delay-free TV-watching – a step up from sites like YouTube, which requires much buffering and loading lag time.

At the same time, Viewo’s video-viewing is being run on blockchain technology, and the company is minting its own cryptocurrency in the process. Isn’t this more than one company can chew? Not exactly. Launched in August 2017, Viewo rewards people – who upload, watch or share its videos – with tokens. The blockchain-based tokens – or Viewo’s cryptocurrency – can be exchanged both on and off the platform.

Mining for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum uses a lot of electricity – much of it wasted. Viewo proposes to make use of that power generated by the mining, to enable viewers to encode non-live video in exchange for Viewo tokens. (Initially, Viewo will run on Ethereum’s platform.)

“We’re using our own blockchain technology to reward users for viewing,” said co-founder and CTO David Price.

The viewing platform also utilizes GPU (graphics processing unit) cloud capabilities – unlike most cloud service hosts, which run on a CPU. That allows instantaneous live streaming – akin to watching TV. “Let’s say you were to watch Eurovision on YouTube. There’s a two-minute delay to encode,” said co-founder Adam Raphael, adding that the encoding – which takes a long time – is for the video to be viewable on television, mobile and computers.

“We invented a technology to get rid of that loading delay and to allow companies to stream live events, where all the encoding is done on a file .... And we can edit the feed in any way we want, with artificial intelligence.”

The AI tools allow Viewo to offer localized advertising – such as modifying a billboard for different national audiences — along with affixing real-time subtitles and manipulating both video and audio.

Viewo was founded by Raphael, Rani Grinberg, and Price. After two-and-a-half weeks, the company enjoys more than 13,000 followers in its Telegram group.

It employs some 16 people, along with additional cryptocurrency and blockchain advisers.

With offices in both Jerusalem and Los Angeles, the start-up is also reportedly backed by more than 150 influencers – with millions of followers.

“We got a lot of YouTubers and influencers complaining about how YouTube was treating them and their audience,” added Raphael. “In the current market, there were no real competitors to YouTube. So we decided not to focus on a platform initially but to focus on video-sharing technology.”

The start-up is still in its private sale phase, having already raised a seven-figure sum of dollars.

“That number is set to go up soon drastically,” added co-founder Price.