iQiyi adopts public blockchain to enhance its services

iQiyi, a video streaming platform owned by the Chinese multinational tech company, Baidu, is looking to enhance users’ experience following its recent partnership with New Kind of Network (NKN) to adopt a public blockchain. 

NKN public blockchain allows sharing of bandwidth

The development is aimed at improving the buffering speeds of the iQiyi, while also preventing network congestion and high consumption of energy. Moreover, the public blockchain provided by NKN allows bandwidth sharing.

According to Zheng “Bruce” Li, the co-founder of NKN, the public blockchain company tends to focus mostly on the network infrastructure to enable such features, including internet connectivity. Meanwhile, the collaboration of both entities marks the development of two emerging innovations, edge computing and blockchain technology.

The emergence of two new technologies

As Li emphasized in the report, edge computing is essential for games and video streaming, AR/VR, Internet of Things (IoT) and autonomous driving. Even at that, he added that blockchain technology can still play an important part in it. 

iQiyi will leverage the “micro-hosting network management” support from NKN’s public blockchain to run and manage CDN software from third-parties, which are operating on the video platform.

CND, which is known as Content Delivery Network, refers to a system of distributed servers, which is used to offer web content to different users, in line with their geographic location, and the site where the content is hosted. 

NKN’s blockchain uses (PoR) mechanism

The public blockchain adopted by iQiyi reportedly runs in a proof-of-relay mining mechanism. NKN believes that the infrastructure of their system can be able to reach millions of nodes. Already, they have about 20,000 nodes currently operating globally.

Notably, the adoption of public blockchain technology is quite an important modification for iQiyi. Founded in 2010, the giant video platform has garnered at least 500 million users, and over six billion hours are usually spent on the platform on a monthly basis. The development today is likely to grow the company even further.