Maybe? Early on Livepeer was limited to very few “provider”.
The second major change proposed by Streamflow is to relax the artificial limit on number of active Transcoders (Orchestrators in Streamflow). At genesis this parameter was set to 10, and has since expanded to 15, however this still creates a major barrier to entry, in that a node needs increasingly more LPT staked in order to enter the active pool.
During the alpha it was important to be in close contact and coordination with the active set so that they could update software frequently, respond to bugs, and help develop and QA the network.
The staking mechanism was already implemented but I didn’t dig deep enough to know how the tokens were distributed. Maybe they choose some providers so that testing was easier?
Providers are never named or publicly known in any project I saw.