Theta Buddy Alexa Skill
TFuel Power Club - Instant Watch Parties to Maximize TFuel earnings
World Poker Tour - Alexa Notification
TFuel Power Club - Alexa Notification
Price Quotes From Alexa
Theta Buddy - Features & Benefits
Theta Labs & Amazon Alexa

Theta Buddy

Theta Buddy links your Alexa device directly to Theta TV's streaming network. This powerful connection strengthens the Theta P2P network by driving video viewers more often and more reliably to the Theta TV platform, where they will share their bandwidth with other viewers, reducing drastically the cost of streaming the source videos.

INTRODUCTION

The Theta Buddy app consists of these parts:

Theta Buddy Web Site
Theta Buddy Alexa Skill
Theta TV stream start/start detection daemon
Theta TV update followed streams list daemon
TFuel Power Club

Theta Buddy Web Site

The web site consists of content to help the user link their account and also provides various help pages to assist the user with Theta Buddy related tasks.

Theta Buddy Alexa Skill

The Alexa Skill is the other half of the account linking operation and uses a double 4-digit PIN procedure, along with the Theta TV authentication token, to securely link a user's Alexa device to their Theta TV account. Once linked, the user will receive notifications directly on their Alexa device whenever a Theta TV channel they follow starts to broadcast. If they are a member of the TFuel Power Club, they will also get a notification whenever any channel starts to broadcast, but only if there is at least one other user within a 1,000 KM radius of them. This maximizes the user's potential to earn TFuel while watching a Theta TV stream by sharing their bandwidth with other users that are close to them geographically.

The user can also ask their Alexa device for the current price of the Theta and TFuel tokens at any time.

Theta TV stream start/start detection daemon

This daemon runs once every 3 seconds. It continuously polls the Theta TV active channels list API. It compares each snapshot with the previous one and determines the list of channels that have just started broadcasting, and those that have just stopped.

The list of new broadcasts is iterated, one channel at a time. For each one, it pulls up the list of Theta Buddy users who follow that channel. This information was retrieved during the account linking process when the user granted access to the app at the start of the account linking process. Each user's Alexa device receives an alert directly on their Alexa device that the channel is now broadcasting.

Theta TV update followed channels list daemon

This daemon runs once an hour. For each user in the Theta Buddy user database, it updates our record of the list of channels they follow using the Theta TV API. This keeps the user's followed channels list updated so any channels they stopped following or started following are picked up by the system.

TFuel Power Club

During the account linking process, the user's IP address details are retrieved from the MaxMind API and stored in a database. Whenever any channel starts broadcasting, the user IP address database is queried in order to build a watch party peer group. The database is scanned until a maximum of ten users are found who occupy the same 1,000 KM radius. The Alexa devices for these people all receive notifications that a channel has just started streaming with high potential to earn TFuel. These users are also marked as "busy" so they do not receive any new alerts for 2 hours. This allows other users to receive notifications to keep the system fair. The process repeats until all the channels in the new broadcasts list have been processed.

UPCOMING ENHANCEMENTS

The TFuel Power Club will also send E-mails, not just Alexa alerts.
TFuel Power Club alerts will be rated with Gold, Silver, & Bronze quality levels based on factors such as: how close the viewers in a watch party actually are to each other, how many of them are on the same ISP, how many viewers are or are not on a VPN or similarly obfuscated connection, and other factors that indicate how likely viewers who watch the stream are likely to earn TFuel.