I’ve spent my entire career up to this point in the entertainment industry. First in technology research, then almost two decades in television and most recently, as the CTO of a major Hollywood studio. Now Live Planet?

My job description as Chief Technology Officer at 20th Century Fox Film Corp. was pretty straightforward: identify any emerging technology trends, determine how they might influence consumer behavior in the future and make sure the studio is prepared for this future. This description is very broad, and for good reason. Sometimes, it’s the most unexpected and surprising technologies that have the biggest impact on the future of an industry.

For example, 4K television sets began emerging right around the time I joined Fox in 2012. We knew consumers would start to buy, and we had to determine how to best prepare our movies to take advantage of these new TVs. We realized very quickly increased image resolution alone would not resonate with consumers, as they would not see a significant difference from the HD televisions they had become accustomed to in the previous 10 years. We created a very productive partnership with Samsung, where we jointly designed the first consumer display, which could support High Dynamic Range (HDR) content. We then ensured the entire ecosystem was ready, by forming the UHD Alliance, the launch of the 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray format and the creation of the Fox Innovation Lab — with Samsung as the inaugural partner. In the end, Samsung enjoyed a first mover advantage in the HDR TV market, and with Fox content ready at the same time, we reaped significant benefits in the form of a hugely disproportionate share of Fox movies in 4K-HDR vs. the overall market. Even though 4K-HDR generated tens of millions in unexpected revenue for Fox, it did not significantly impact the general decline of the transactional movie business.

However, where things got even more interesting is when we went further off the beaten path.

Thanks to some personal connections, I asked Ericsson to become a partner in our Innovation Lab as well. The idea was that entertainment, especially in developing markets around the globe, was going mobile very rapidly. As a studio, we had to keep up on where mobile technology is going, especially given the imminent emergence of 5G. This led to numerous initiatives, including 20th Century Fox joining the Ericsson Unified Delivery Network initiative as one of the first content partners, and a proof of concept at the 2018 U.S. Open. In collaboration with Ericsson, Qualcomm and Intel, our FOX Sports group connected a couple of 4K cameras back to the truck using 5G wireless links. Even though the conditions were not great (strong winds and rain the first day), the setup worked flawlessly and got a ringing endorsement for 5G technology in sports. Why 5G? Golf is an extremely tough sport to cover on television: the action is all over the course, you never know where the next great shot is going to come from, and you need tons of cameras to cover it all. They also better be wireless cameras because you need to be extremely mobile. Only 5G has the bandwidth and reliability to enable 4K broadcast-quality video.

Our foray into mobile also opened many opportunities to create transformative new content distribution models, which will come to fruition in coming years. Examples include very low-cost content distribution to customers in developing markets, and massive adoption of virtual and augmented reality experiences.

However, the key for 5G is decentralization. 5G can only fulfill its promises of very high bandwidth, very low latency, and very high reliability with a very dense and intricate network of radio access and edge compute nodes. This will not work if for every piece of data and every compute decision, a client needs to connect to a central cloud. Much of the IoT data from sensors, vehicles, etc. is only relevant in a local context, and is much better served from a local resource provided by a decentralized edge compute network. People have been talking about edge computing for a decade — but the conversation mainly focuses on somewhat centralized resources on some level (thousands of clients per node). What 5G needs is resources for only dozens of clients per node. That’s what real decentralization will look like.

I was first introduced to this concept in the late 90s, when I read Michio Kaku’s “Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century”. It’s a great book, giving some very realistic predictions of what the future holds for mankind in different areas of science and technology. One of his theses (originally formulated by Mark Weiser of the famous Xerox PARC,) is that at some point in our evolution, compute power will be as ubiquitous, cheap and accessible as scrap paper. Kaku also predicted that we’ll shift from using our own compute resources, like personal computers, and instead use whatever is around us. He likened it to how the use of electricity evolved: from a scarce and centrally-located resource in the 19th century, to something that literally comes out of the walls around us.

This leads me to blockchain technology, as it’s a key enabler for the coming decentralization revolution. Blockchains are decentralized by design and thus inherently support the resource management and compensation structures needed to enable decentralized compute networks.

For the last two years, I’ve been an advisor to the VideoCoin Network project. Halsey Minor and his team have done great work creating truly unique and trailblazing solutions for the management of decentralized compute resources. Applying these concepts to emerging technologies like 5G mobile networks is a match made in heaven.

I started my career in entertainment when digital audio and video were just becoming a thing, and I’ve been at the forefront of digital processing and distribution technologies for the last 27+ years. I feel the same now about 5G, blockchain and decentralized computing — to the point where I can make a fulfilling second career out of it but also help make a difference in the world by enabling exciting new consumer experiences in an efficient and resource-conscious manner.

Hanno Basse