Vidaio sells AI video compression and upscaling by the minute through a website and an API, and runs a Bittensor subnet whose miners compete every two weeks to supply the models. Its best-known claim is that its files are "up to 80% smaller", restated this week by an investor as "half the size of AWS compression"; the team's own commissioned benchmark (17 Jun 2026) found 7.8–9.7% fewer bits than open-source FFmpeg at the same picture quality, with the cost advantage coming from hitting a quality target in one encode. Revenue is claimed and not evidenced: a credit-billed API, a joint venture with a UK post-production house and one enterprise test are described, but no customer count, usage or dollar figure is published. The token is a claim on $4.43M a year of issuance, 86% of its $5.17M market cap; the owner's account has been a net seller of alpha for the last 30 days.
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Products | Video upscaling (2×/4×) and AI-driven compression, by upload on the site or by URL through the API; live streaming with AI dubbing and subtitles is "coming soon" (the beta streamed the Exploit Summit on 28–29 Sep); dubbing and localisation are sold through PIP Studios as CABIN |
| How it is billed | Credits: the API refuses a job without credits (HTTP 402) and consumes them when the result is fetched. No public price list; the June benchmark priced Vidaio at about $0.067 a delivered minute. The October 2025 plan was about $0.05 a minute at a 75% margin, with enterprise fiat split 75% to miners and 25% to Vidaio; none of that is in the September 2026 whitepaper |
| Channels | "One stack. Five verticals" (18 Aug): PIP (localisation dashboard), Sentinel (own compression tool), Manako (compression embedded on a client's site), Vidaio Enterprise, Vidaio Retail; "PiP and Manako are rolling out" |
| Customers | None named. The 4 Aug enterprise test and the IBC prospects are unnamed; PIP's studio clients are PIP's. No usage or revenue figure on the site, API, X, TAO Daily's twenty-plus articles or the podcasts |
| Financing | DSV Fund OTC purchase, 1 Dec 2025, amount undisclosed (TAO Daily); MEXC listing 6 May 2026; Stillcore covers Vidaio and its partner mined it, no round disclosed. Incubated by the parent company of Taostats (Graichen, Apr 2025) |
| Encoder or method | Compared with | Bits saved at equal quality | Source and caveat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vidaio (AV1) | Self-hosted FFmpeg, same codec | 7.8% | Vidaio-commissioned; hit the target in one encode in 68% of jobs |
| Vidaio (H.265) | Self-hosted FFmpeg | 9.7% | Same test |
| AWS MediaConvert, single encode | Self-hosted FFmpeg | −90% (file larger) | TAO Daily, 24 Jun on the same test; AWS was not allowed its usual multi-pass search |
| Beamr CABR (content-adaptive bitrate) | The customer's existing encode | 30–50% claimed | Beamr on AWS Marketplace; vendor claim |
| Deep Render neural codec | SVT-AV1 | 45–46% | Jan Ozer, May 2025, subjective test; low-latency configuration only |
| AV1 (any encoder) | x265 (H.265) | about 35% | Streaming Media; the codec step buyers take first |
Upscaling has no published head-to-head: the MSU upscaler benchmark lists Topaz and Real-ESRGAN but Vidaio has not entered it, and Vidaio's competitions score entries on its own hidden clips, so quality against Topaz (now Adobe's) is unrated rather than rated and losing.
| Vendor | What the buyer gets | Price per output minute |
|---|---|---|
| Vidaio | Compression to a VMAF target in one encode; upscaling 2×/4×; credit-billed API | about $0.067 (benchmark estimate); upscaling not published |
| AWS Elemental MediaConvert | HD AVC single pass $0.024, multi-pass $0.042; HEVC $0.048–0.084; 4K higher | $0.024–0.084 |
| Bitmovin | Per-title encoding, pay as you go after 2,000 free minutes a month | $0.02 |
| Google Transcoder API | HD output, any codec | $0.030 |
| Beamr Cloud | Content-adaptive bitrate reduction on AWS | $0.04 plus compute |
| Mux, Coconut, api.video | Encoding bundled with hosting and delivery | free–$0.031; $0.015 |
| Topaz Video (Adobe) via fal.ai | AI upscaling to 720p, 1080p, 4K | $0.60–3.60 |
On rate card Vidaio is two to three times the cloud encoders. Its pitch is that it reaches a quality target in one pass where the others need three to five, which only matters to a buyer who encodes to a VMAF target rather than a preset; the benchmark's $145,000 alternative is that search loop priced at list.
| Who | What they do | How they are paid | Per day | Customer money? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Miners (five paid slots) | Enter a sealed code competition every two weeks (compression, upscaling, object removal, now frame interpolation); the latest result's five placed entries share all miner emission for two weeks, 89.55% to the winner. The 73 miners serving everyday compression and upscaling requests earn nothing since 27 Sep | New alpha | $5.0k | No |
| Validators and stakers (one paid hotkey) | Copy the weight vector that Vidaio's own scoring server publishes each epoch, after checking its hash on chain. The owner's hotkey receives all validator dividends; 25 outside hotkeys delegate through it and earn 30–37% a year | New alpha | $5.0k | No |
| Vidaio, the subnet owner (coldkey 5GTPB…) | Runs the scoring server, the competitions, the website and the API; holds 2.2% of alpha; sold a net 134 τ of alpha in the 30 days to 11 Oct | The 18% owner cut in alpha | $2.2k | No |
| Licensing treasury (UID 111) | A hotkey the team registered on 6 Oct to pay "licensing fees" to winners whose code runs on the website; it takes 0.5% of miner emission while a result pays and 50% of any gap | New alpha | $0.0k | No |
| Alpha holders | No buyback, burn-from-revenue or fee sink. 30 days to 11 Oct: owner buys −$38,864 (net sales), burn $14,795 (emission sent to the sink slot, not a purchase), outflow $337,120, team-verified | — | — | No |
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Cadence | A competition every two weeks, each result paying for two weeks. Live: frame interpolation 003b (double the frame rate; speed counts 30% of the score), enrolment closes 16 Oct 14:00 UTC, results not before 20 Oct |
| Entry cost | Registration 0.0005 τ; a stake floor of 500 α (about $840) on the entering hotkey; the miner's own development and GPU time. Entries are private repositories at a pinned commit, run sealed without network on an L40S against 16 hidden clips; commercial licences only |
| Split, on chain | Crown (score at or over the bar, 0.85 here): 90/4/3/2/1 to five places; podium: 50/24/13/8/5. Today UID 202 holds 89.55% for winning object removal 002 (score 0.789 against 28 ranked entries); the licensing treasury takes 0.5% |
| Miners paid against entries | Five paid of 28 ranked in the last result; three entries so far in the live one. The 73 miners enrolled on the inference tracks (51 compression, 22 upscaling) are paid nothing |
| Is the winning code published? | A crown winner is paid only after its source archive is released, and the results page links one; podium code stays private. The team's premium encoder is "not part of the public build" |
Miner slots (UIDs) validators paid each day, read from chain (latest block 9,248,983); the owner's own key is left out because the chain burns its share. Slots, not companies. About 100 slots were paid until mid-June 2026; the June rule change paid the top five per pool (ten), and since 27 September only the latest competition's five placed entries and the licensing-treasury slot are paid, so the fall tracks the payout rules, not miners leaving: 73 miners are enrolled on the inference tracks and earn nothing.
The owner coldkey holds 66,813 α (2.2% of outstanding, $112.5k) and sold a net 134 τ ($38,864) of alpha in the 30 days to 11 Oct (taorevenue, team-verified); it locked about a third of its holding with a decaying lock, and an outside account locked a further 3.7% of all alpha to its hotkey permanently. Its 18% cut is worth $0.80M a year at spot, against no measured customer revenue.