Plasma’s red carpet moment: managing film IP in Cannes

Plasma revolutionizing the film industry with on-chain rights management.

Until recently, applying Plasma solutions to real life problems seemed like a far away endeavour, but already now it’s slowly and steadily becoming reality. Beginning with pop up economies at ETH Denver and Blocksplit, we saw Burner Wallet’s potential for easy onboarding. Now, we move on to an even more interesting and excited challenge!

Last week the LeapDAO team has joined two other blockchain projects - Cinemarket and White Rabbit at the Cannes Film Festival (yes... the famous annual red carpet situation) to demonstrate the potential of utilizing blockchain to professionalize peer-to-peer streaming, while capturing value in the film industry and distributing it to producers and rights holders. The presented solution enabled film rights holders to maximize the exploitation of their assets in more territories and allows streaming sites to open new revenue streams.

Our project partners propose to embrace and professionalize peer-to-peer streaming with blockchain. Cinemarket is a secure online transaction platform enabling license owners to sell their film directly to distributors and exhibitors, while White Rabbit provides a browser plug-in which recognizes streamed content. Their founders realize that we are at a crucial point in time for the future of film, and it is vital to have a film industry that owns its digital distribution through technology, rather than the tech industry pushing the film industry to one side, and monopolizing the production space.

At the Cannes Film Festival last week, we connected film producers and right owners with their audience in a peer-to-peer manner. To that purpose, we prepared a demo in which rights holders can register film rights on the Leap Network as NFTs. Tokens are minted on the plasma chain and can be moved to mainnet later using ERC1949, while spending conditions (smart contracts on Plasma) are used to distribute payments according to token data following ERC1948.

Rights holders are able to register their right to an existing production and set their addresses by scanning a QR code. Another scan launches a rights holder wallet (adapted Burner Wallet) where they can manage their titles and see royalty payments.

From the streamers perspective, the demo features a streaming site working with the decentralized rights registry and a movie browser. After 10 seconds of streaming a browser plugin pops up asking the viewer to contribute to the rights holders of the particular movie. The plugin wallet and allows the user to pay for the stream (\$2). When the transfer is sent, the streamer is able to continue watching the movie while the wallet of the rights holder receives the payment within 2-3 seconds. You can view the entire demo flow in this slide deck.

The demo participants were movie producers and rights holders who came to Cannes and didn’t have much previous experience with crypto. Collecting payments for streams has sparked many discussions among them. The mostly non-technical audience was impressed by the easy of onboarding and the speed of transfers.

Our Cannes demo aimed to show the ease, speed and transparency of payments from content consumers to rights holders. Thanks to this solution, producers are no longer disconnected from their audience, keep the rights of their production, and tap into a wide new market. Peer-to-peer streaming, illegal so far, can now be monetized. We hope that this industry-changing demo utilizing Plasma at the Cannes Film Festival will prove that professionalizing peer-to-peer streaming can unlock huge rewards for both fans and rights holders.

Are you interested in a personal demo of the Cannes project? Or do you have a great idea for another Plasma use case with fungible and/or non-fungible tokens? Contact us!

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