Google Cloud has brokered another partnership in its exploration of blockchain technologies, with the company joining the enterprise program of blockchain-based video delivery network Theta Labs.

Google has joined the grandly-named Enterprise Validator Program, alongside Binance, Blockchain Ventures, and Gumi, which ‘allows enterprises to validate transactions in accordance with Theta’s underlying consensus protocol’, in its own words.

Theta’s business case is to broadly put together a decentralised content delivery network (CDN), which will aim to solve the problems of combining high quality data throughput with no buffering, as well as giving more revenues to content creators rather than arbiters. Blockchain comes in through what the company calls ‘Theta fuel’ – tokens on which a value exchange is based between viewer and video platform.

“Theta and its partners in the media and entertainment, telecom, technology and gaming industries thus provide a high performance decentralised micropayment network that scales to millions of concurrent video viewers,” Theta wrote in a Medium post.

Google Cloud’s role will be to provide ‘stability, reliability and security’ to the Theta network, in the company’s words.

“Distributed ledger technology enables new business models that potentially transform the global digital economy, including the media and entertainment industry,” said Allen Day, Google Cloud developer advocate. “We look forward to participating as an enterprise validator, and to providing Google Cloud infrastructure in support of Theta’s long-term mission and future growth.”

The partnership comes amid the launch of Theta’s 2.0 mainnet, which represents a step forward in the company’s decentralisation process.
Google Cloud is forging its own path when it comes to exploring blockchain. Unlike the route of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure in offering managed blockchain services – a report from Everest Group at the start of this year omitted the Mountain View company completely – partnerships and more bespoke offerings are the order of the day. Google itself, rather than Google Cloud, is a member of the Hedera Governing Council, while the company has a standing partnership with Cypherium, alongside AWS and IBM.

You can read the full Theta announcement here.

Editor’s note: Read more blockchain news and analysis on The Block, a sister publication of CloudTech.

Photo by Kushagra Kevat on Unsplash

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