64 HAPPENING Media Honeypot
available to all, of who did what and when. This could allow for instantaneous payments and contracts, as well as more easily trackable content rights – all removed from the obfuscations of intermediary institutions. ‘Content is king’ is the mantra we hear ad nauseum, but Müller pointed out that this is not the case. It isn’t content owners who are calling the shots in the digital media economy, it’s the intermediaries – the platforms who create and enable the connections between content maker and content consumer. Value accumulates not with the content producer but with the platform that is delivering or enabling the consumption of that content. And these platforms, says Müller, are destroying the dream of an open web. Blockchain technology recalls an idealistic, perhaps excessively libertarian, view of the internet as a place without bosses or institutions, a kind of peer-to- peer paradise. In our view, a world with no institutions or intermediaries is as misguided as one with hyper-powerful ones, but there is no doubt that the democratic potentials of connected digital technology have been obliterated by the dominance of the big tech giants. In the meantime, throughout the day, the Media Honeypot speed dating ‘deal room’ offered short, timer-limited head-to- head meetings for conference delegates. Organised and scheduled through Deal Room online networking platform, itself a
start-up in attendance at Media Honeypot, the meetings allowed FEED to get connected with a host of new companies in the start-up space. Look out to read more about them in upcoming instalments of our Start-up Alley. As if that weren’t enough for a compact, day-long show, Media Honeypot featured a start-up pitch-fest, with new companies outlining their offerings for the assembled delegates and not a few potential investors.
The question of how European media companies might compete with the Silicon Valley giants was a theme returned to again and again during this year’s Media Honeypot. How can we make ourselves more like the global tech businesses that dominate the online space? I think the solution is so obvious that most attendees missed it – the question is not how can Helsinki be more like Big Tech, but how can Big Tech be more like Helsinki?
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