Our new Disruption by Blockchain series aims to highlight companies that are leveraging the incredible potential of blockchain technology to disrupt and revolutionize their industry. Through one on one interviews, we'll speak directly with industry leaders to cut beyond the hype and get directly to the heart of practical use cases and examples of how it will change the world, one industry at a time.

1. What’s the history of Flixxo?

The idea of creating decentralized video distribution platform originates from Adrián Garelik, the founder of RSK Labs. He had decided to create something on top of Bitcoin for financing and distributing films, his concept was “content is a value, and content licenses are the rules tied to that value”. Adrian teamed up with Federico Abad, the creator of Popcorn Time, and with a really smart crypto expert, Pablo Carbajo. After that, they brought Javier D´Ovidio to the team, and started to develop Flixxo, a decentralized and incentivized network for distributing and monetizing video.

Read the full story here.

2. Who are the founders and key team members?

Adrián Garelik

Co-founder at RSK Labs, developing solutions for OTT since 1998. Film producer.

Pablo Carbajo

Creator of Riecoin, 15-year experience developing embedded systems at IBM, Toshiba.

Federico Abad

Creator of PopCorn Time.

Javier D ́Ovidio

Co-Founder and VP of Operations at EDRANS AI and Big Data.

3. What problem are you solving?

Today, as video relies on high infrastructural costs on bandwidth and storage, only 3 companies can afford deploying a global platform, and they have monopolized the market, creating an environment in which authors are not monetizing, users don´t watch quality content and advertisers cannot reach their targeted audiences with their message.

Flixxo

4. What is your solution to this problem?

We offer an open and democratic platform for online video distribution and consumption. Blockchain can help us by creating incentives for users to become distributors of content and also to set clear rules on content distribution. Creating a network of incentivized content distributors with transparent norms on how the content monetizes brings up new ways of connecting authors straight with consumers, creating new bonds and raising the levels of engagement. Creators allocate a percentage of earnings gained with those users who are willing to seed the content as part of the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing network. This system removes the need for exorbitantly expensive servers to store the content. In addition, advertising is very non-intrusive on Flixxo. Advertisers buy Flixx from content creators and then create a smart contract to determine how much they will pay users to watch their ads. Users choose to watch advertising to gain Flixx, which is used to watch more videos. The result is a thriving financial ecosystem where everybody wins.

5. Why is online video ripe for disruption?

Today, all social networks are turning to video as the dominant tool for engaging users on their platforms. Facebook is about to spend $300M to produce their own content, while Warner is planning a $100M budget for creating original content on Instagram. Around 70% of internet traffic is video, and this number is increasing to reach more than 80% in 2020. This business currently belongs to few players, as traditional video platforms rely upon huge costs on storage and bandwidth. These companies have monopolized the market, creating an advertising-centric ecosystem in which the biggest revenues are for the platforms. Content creators are not satisfied with the reward they get for their job, profit of video-sharing platforms decrease each year and viewers are sick of low-quality content and advertising. All sides are ready for changes and desperately need them.

6. What’s the future of online video?

In the next years, blockchain based video solutions will stand up as alternatives for centralized video platforms, offering better quality content and better monetization models for content creators.

Many new emerging platforms based on actual developments (such as Flixxo) will disrupt the ecosystem bringing out more professional content with no subscription bonds and with fair competitive prices (picture paying fifty cents for each episode of the new mainstream series on a legit platform, instead of paying an annual $10/month subscription)

On our side, having many millions of users who already learned about giving away tokens in exchange of higher quality content, we would be able to start distributing Films and TV shows. Also, our network of p2p content distributors will be serving many platforms at the same time.