Media Production and Blockchain

The take-up of blockchain (or more accurately Distributed Ledger Technology) in the TV/film industry has been relatively slow to date, while other industries seem to be jumping at the opportunity. It may be the toxic image of crypto, and let’s face it money is often a dirty word at the sharp end of creativity, but with art and music driving the huge growth in NFTs in 2021, the TV and film industry have at last woken up and started to take note.

With a number of movie-themed launches this year, particularly at Cannes, I was interested to see what new use-cases I could find for blockchain in media production. After all, this is the kind of paradigm shifting technology that half of my kid’s generation will end up with a career in (the half who aren’t feeding an AI and trying to stop it from escaping its cage!).

So, here is a list of the most interesting sites and services I found, loosely scattered along the TV/film value chain. It is an exciting (i.e. risky) market and I suspect many of these innovative early application won’t be the final applications that will take it to the mainstream, but they do give a strong sense of the direction and that there are real use-cases for blockchain in the industry.

Crowd Development & Funding:

Rights & revenue:

  • Filmchain – revenue tracking and royalty management for TV/film

Distribution / Streaming:

  • Livepeer – decentralised streaming and encoding
  • Theta Labs – video platform and decentralised encoding
  • LBRY – censorship free, monetizable publishing (any format)

Merchandising/NFTs:

  • Opensea – the biggest NFT marketplace
  • Curio – NFT marketplace (used by Fremantle for American Gods)
  • Veve – digital collectable (i.e. NFTs) market
  • Tarantino NFTs – the director monetising script sales

Video Curation:

  • Filmzie – video streaming and curation with verifiable analytics
  • White Rabbit – curating to combat/monetise piracy
  • Dtube – decentralised censorship free (and controversial) YouTube clone

Decentralised storage (e.g. permanent storage for NFTs):

  • IPFS – a place to host NFT
  • Arweave – the perma web, storage and apps

Newer blockchain alternatives:

  • Hedera – Hash Graph based decentralised network
  • Radix – faster/greener Cerberus blockchain network

NFTs for Ticketing:

  • AfterParty – Festival with NFTs giving interesting ticket rights
  • yellowheart – NFT ticketing marketplace
  • seatlab – ticketing service using NFTs

Sustainability:

Ffilm Werdd blockchain – MVP of tool for production companies to offset carbon emissions