Why You Should Run a Gateway

Reasons you should run a Livepeer Gateway

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Business Hat Time!

As discussed in the Gateway Economics section, Gateways in Livepeer do not currently earn protocol fees - by design.

Gateway Economics

Read about Gateway Economics Here

Instead, Gateways sit at the demand, control, and product layer of the Livepeer network.

They are not just services routers - they are also where businesses, products, SLAs, compliance, and customer relationships actually live.

This is where customers connect, policy is enforced, workloads are shaped, and real businesses are built.

Running a gateway is a strategic infrastructure decision

Reasons include both technical and product needs.

Product Mental Model

Gateways

• own customer relationships
• control ingress and demand
• shape reliability and latency
• enable compliance and enterprise sales
• provide product differentiation

In every mature infrastructure market (cloud, CDNs, payments, telecom), the control plane and edge capture durable value even when execution is commoditised (ie. by Orchestrators in the case of Livepeer).

If orchestrators are “factories,” gateways are the ports, customs offices, and logistics companies.

Why Run a Gateway?

Below is some of the reasons you might decide to run a Livepeer Gateway - grouped into clear business and technical categories.

Change to Cards?

Direct Usage & Platform Integration

1) Direct Usage & Platform Integration

Reasons related to using a gateway as part of your own product or operations.

• Run your own workloads – Process your own video or AI content end-to-end with full control over ingestion, routing, retries, and delivery.
• Ensure SLAs on orchestrators – Enforce latency, availability, retries, and failover through explicit orchestrator selection and routing logic.
• Embed in a larger platform – Use the gateway as internal infrastructure powering a broader media or AI product rather than exposing protocol primitives.

Economics & Monetization

2) Economics & Monetization

Reasons related to where money is made or saved.

• Service-layer monetization – Charge end users more than orchestrator cost for reliability, compliance, convenience, or performance guarantees.
• Avoid third-party gateway fees – Eliminate routing fees, pricing risk, and policy constraints imposed by another gateway operator.

Reliability, Performance & QoS

3) Demand Control & Traffic Ownership

Reasons related to owning and shaping demand.

• Demand aggregation & traffic ownership – Own ingress, customer relationships, usage data, and traffic predictability across apps or customers.
• Workload normalization – Smooth bursty demand into predictable, orchestrator-friendly workloads.

Reliability, Performance & QoS

4) Reliability, Performance & QoS

Reasons related to making the system work in real production environments.

• QoS enforcement & workload shaping – Control routing, retries, failover, and latency vs cost trade-offs beyond protocol defaults.
• Geographic request steering – Route users to regionally optimal orchestrators to reduce latency and improve reliability.

Security & Compliance

5) Security & Compliance

Reasons related to enterprise and production requirements.

• Enterprise policy enforcement – IP allowlists, audit logs, authentication, rate limits, and deterministic behavior.
• Cost-explosion & abuse protection – Prevent buggy or malicious clients from generating runaway compute costs.

Product Differentiation & UX

6) Product Differentiation & UX

Reasons related to building differentiated products on top of the protocol.

• Product differentiation above the protocol – Custom APIs, SDKs, dashboards, billing abstractions, and AI workflow presets live at the gateway layer.
• Stable API surface – Shield customers from protocol or orchestrator churn with versioning and controlled change.

Observability & Feedback Loops

7) Observability & Feedback Loops

Reasons related to seeing and improving the system over time.

• Analytics & feedback loops – Visibility into request patterns, failures, latency distributions, model performance, and customer behavior.

Strategy, Optionality & Ecosystem Power

8) Strategy, Optionality & Ecosystem Power

Reasons related to long-term leverage and positioning.

• Strategic independence – Avoid pricing, roadmap, availability, or censorship risk from other gateway operators.
• Future optionality – Early positioning if gateway incentives or economics evolve in the future.
• Ecosystem influence – Gateways shape standards, surface protocol gaps, and influence real-world usage patterns.