37 TECHFEED Blockchain
e’re all pretty sure that blockchain is going to be very useful for something – but we’re still not quite sure
RIGHT NOW, THE BIG STUDIOS ARE MORE WILLING TO LISTEN TO INNOVATORS IN THIS SPACE, BECAUSE OF THE DISRUPTIONS CAUSED BY NETFLIX AND YOUTUBE what that something is. While most of us continue to sit on the sidelines, speculating about the future of blockchain in the media industry, there are a number of companies rolling up their sleeves and getting their hands dirty. How we use blockchain in ten years may look nothing like some of these business models, but these blockchain pioneers are paving the way by trialling blockchain- enabled businesses in the real world. BitMovio’s goal is to ‘bring a Fortnite- style, gamified experience to video entertainment’. This may sound vague, but the company’s founders are anything but starry-eyed fantasists. CEO Simon Zhu added a Masters from Stanford Graduate School of Business to his science and engineering education obtained in his native China and most founding personnel are graduates from Stanford and MIT. monetisation,” says Zhu. “For consumers, there are really only a few models out there. One is SVOD, which is dominated by Netflix, the other is AVOD, which is dominated by YouTube. And then there is TVOD, which is iTunes or Amazon Video. This is bad for consumers and for creators, because they don’t have as many choices.” After launching in June 2018, the company spent three months in Boston on an accelerator programme at MIT, then settled in the San Francisco Bay area. The company has raised more than $1.2 million “We saw a huge gap in the video streaming market, in terms of the user experience and in terms of the
in seed money so far and launched an open beta of its product in February this year via an app and website. CONTENT The channel is beginning to add to its content roster slowly but surely, starting with the likes of World Poker Tour, some broadcast TV series and a large number of sci-fi, fantasy and horror titles. Sean Stone, conspiracy documentary filmmaker, and son of director Oliver Stone, has also adopted the platform as his sole online distributor. “All the major movie studios are very scared and so they’re trying to launch their own competing SVOD services, but everyone knows that Netflix and YouTube have been in the market for over a decade. They have invested in a lot of their own technologies, so a lot of these new entrants are going to be lagging behind,“ he says. With BitMovio, Zhu wants to create an alternative platform, offering a new set of experiences and one that emphasises the well-being of creators and customers. BitMovio also embraces the idea of micropayments, small amounts of money for paid-for content, which can add up to a considerable amount for creators when intermediaries are eliminated by direct blockchain-enabled payments. “For some of the older movies or even some documentaries, right now very few people would want to pay even $1.99 to watch these, but they might pay a few cents,” Zhu explains. The platform can enable subscriptions as well, with a monthly Patreon-type model, where the subscription payment goes right to the creator. Advertising on the platform copies rewards-based methods more familiar in the gaming world. If a user is trying to engage with the platform or access premium content and discovers they don’t have enough Movibits – an in-platform
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