Last year I was invited to MIP TV in Cannes to speak about blockchain. It was their first panel ever on the subject and, considering MIP is the leading event for digital and TV related content, expectations were high. I shared the panel with two other speakers who were representing different projects. The lady sitting next to me started her lecture stating “When you put your content on a blockchain…” There is no way of putting content on a blockchain. A piece of video could easily weigh a couple of gigabytes and, when the discussion is whether a Bitcoin block should be 1 or 2 megabytes, the whole concept of building a blockchain out of videos is insane! This kind of misinformation and confusion was brought once again on every single event that year. All of a sudden, everybody seemed to be a blockchain expert and, by adding that title to their LinkedIn accounts, they got a spot for speaking to an industry that is hungry for new technologies and disruption.

“Blockchain” was used as a magic word, as a synonym of “Hocus Pocus”. Instead of teaching, or bringing up a real discussion with the industry, speakers brought empty promises without any kind of justification. “Hocus Pocus will be used as a mean of eradicating piracy” or “Hocus Pocus and there will be full traceability on your content”. I heard a lot of Whats, but never heard a How.

“People use electricity, yet they don’t know how electricity works. You don’t need to know what a blockchain is or how it works, you just need to learn what can be done using a blockchain. In the future, holographic cities will be built on top of blockchain…” This is real. A guy told this to a confused audience at another event. By October, MIPCOM had five different panels about blockchain.

One of the speakers really caught the attention of the assistants, it was Andrea Iervolino with his record ICO for his platform TaTaTu. No one dared to understand his token model, he had raised $575MM and the platform has some Blockchain behind. TaTaTu offered premium content for free while also giving away valuable tokens to the consumers. Free premium content and an economic reward for watching it… where is the money for the content creators here? No one dares. Blockchain Hocus Pocus.

A postcard from Cannes Series 2019

Luckily, we have built a reputation, and we are not only invited to speak about blockchain, but we are also part of the short form series nascent industry. We’ve been invited to the Berlinale — Berlin’s Film Festival — to speak about series and I was honored to be part of the jury at Cannes Series — an event inside MIPTV — a couple of weeks ago. Do you want to bet on how many blockchain panels were held in there this time? The answer is zero.

After a year of nonsense and unqualified speakers yelling gibberish, a formerly eager industry is now looking at blockchain with indifference. Yes, there was a lot of hype when Bitcoin skyrocketed to USD20K and deception when it crashed to $3K, but this is not about the price of the asset, it is about the potential of the technology.

Once I heard that blockchain is a solution in the search of problems. I cannot agree more with this statement. A week after Cannes Series I was invited to take part on a panel about the entertainment industry at the Paris Blockchain Week Summit. In this event, the Hocus Pocus was used to describe the problems blockchain could solve, as everybody is anxious to find a killer app that will bring massive adoption to crypto. But most of the proposed solutions were completely unrelated to the reality of the entertainment industry.

With White Rabbit and Havas Blockchain — plus DTube, not in the picture — at Paris Blockchain Summit

When proposing to monetize the traffic of illegal networks — think on Bittorrent token for example — even if that money could be sent to the actual owner of the intelectual property, paying for an obscure delivery means that the money will jump over some licensees, bringing only liabilities to the owner of the content. The entertainment industry is a license business, and a content creator that has already licensed his product to a streaming service cannot monetize on alternative distribution channels.

By introducing a censorship free platform, with a company behind, it makes the company an accomplice of monetizing the illegal-unethical content that is spread through their network — e.g. the shooting on the New Zealand’s mosque — making their business an illegal-unethical business and their token worthless. Free speech means free speech…

I can only speak of what I really know, but if I took these cases and extend them to other industries I would be very disappointed. Are we in the blockchain industry giving real attention to the use cases we promote? Are we in the entertainment industry really keen on getting involved with new technologies and new business models, even if it takes time to learn and understand them?

Conclusion

There is a huge opportunity for players involved in both sides of the equation. We know about entertainment and we know about blockchain. That gives us a unique point of view on how to succeed in our endeavors.

Entertainment industry may bring a lot of attention and new users into blockchain technologies, if we succeed on attracting masses to a platform or ecosystem in which there is a layer that involves cryptocurrencies. Projects in which the consumer needs to know about crypto — before even starting to use the platform — will find it difficult to acquire users. Ease of use, intuitive user experiences, that’s definitely the road to take. And, of course, a decent content strategy. On the other hand, a realistic promise for the blockchain ecosystem: to build something that works and is being used by real consumers. Not a huge decentralized utopia to be implemented in ten years, but a case in which blockchain can be used right now.

Not blockchain magic, but a blockchain based model in which usability and content are the kings.