If you are a crypto-investor like me, you are always on the lookout for great ideas. And the crypto-market doesn’t disappoint. Blockchains have spurred a plethora of creativity. You can find a worthy idea almost every day.

Of course, ideas aren’t everything. Real businesses need to convert those ideas into actionable plans. So when I am looking at a new project, I am always trying to evaluate the potential. I am trying to figure out if there is a need or a market. More than the number of people investing, I try to check if the idea has a potential to attract users. That’s why Flixxo caught my attention. It seems like an idea that can go places.

Popcorntime and Smart Contracts on Bitcoin — what could go wrong?

Flixxo Preparing to Fight the Behemoths of the Video Content Industry

In short, Flixxo is a decentralized video distribution system. You can think of it as a decentralized YouTube.

To understand Flixxo, let’s look at the lifecycle of any video you upload to any other social network. When you use your creative ideas and produce a video, you naturally want to share it with friends, family and beyond. So you upload it to YouTube or Facebook. The social networks take this video and store it on their servers. Servers are basically powerful computers. The social networks are storing and distributing your video as an investment. They are bearing the cost of purchasing and maintaining those servers.

As your video gets viewed by other users of the network, it is increasing in value because it is accumulating information. The social networks are collecting that information. They are building complex data models to create advertising revenue. When the social networks sell advertisement slots, they profit from the information. If you are a prominent content provider or influencer with lots of likes and subscribers, the social networks might pay you part of the profit. But in most cases, you are producing free content for the social network for the price of using their servers for storage and distribution. You don’t benefit from your own creation directly.

Flixxo is trying to solve this problem. With Flixxo network, when you upload your video content, it will not be uploaded to a single company’s server. Instead, other users help you store and distribute your video. The people who provide the storage and computing power will get paid in Flixx tokens. If you are a creator or influencer, you are going to get paid in Flixx tokens for the likes you get from other users.

Possible Scaling solution either by Ethereum or Bitcoin —The Team announced they will also consider Bitcoin Rootstock (Remember what the CEO of Flixxo worked on before?)

At the same time, it also changes the dynamics between content creators and advertisers. In the centralized model, advertisers pay the social network companies and then their ads are shown before certain contents. There is a close coupling of content and advertisement. But in the Flixxo model, content and advertising are not attached to each other. Consumers watch the content on a classical “pay-per-view” way. They earn “value” or tokens by watching the advertisements. In the traditional model, both creators and advisers worry about the negative repercussions of a wrong coupling of content and advertisement. But Flixxo removes that connection. Advertisers pay the users to watch advertisements and users pay the creator to watch content. So the close coupling of ads and content is removed.

So there are valid reasons for the excitement surrounding Flixxo. It’s good for video content creators and influencers. It’s good for the advertisers. It’s also good for consumers because they can contribute directly to the creators they like and have more influence.

Flixxo Technology: How it Works

Well, it sounds like a utopian dream. But how is Flixxo going to achieve this? This is what excited me the most. Flixxo isn’t reinventing the wheel. It’s taking the well-known peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P) technology called BitTorrent and marrying it with blockchain and smart contracts. Even though BitTorrent is a great technology, it has faced an uphill battle due to its use in content piracy. There is no way to keep track of ownership on BitTorrent. So it’s used to share content illegally. But adding blockchain and smart contracts to the mix, it’s possible to use the power of BitTorrent while maintaining strict copyright protocols. Blockchains will help keep track of ownership, while smart contracts will help transactions of copyrighted material. The marriage of these technologies is going to help Flixxo create a peer-to-peer video content distribution network that benefits creators and influencers directly.

Preview of the Platform (Launch in June 2018)

Why Flixxo Makes Sense Now

If you dig a little on social networks, you will notice a lot of discontent among the content creators. The large corporations impose restrictions on creativity. The censorship is not always direct. Often social networks use the power of demonetization to punish any creator who doesn’t follow the rules. And the rules are often moving targets. Revenue of content creators and influencers are at the whim of the social networks.

As a result, there is a lot of potentials for content creators and influencers to move from the centralized networks to decentralized distribution systems. If enough creators and influencers start to move, word-of-mouth will help move the audience. And as the audience moves, so will the advertisers. So the decentralized video distribution is ripe for peer-to-peer marketing and Flixxo is set up to capture that market.

Special Incentives for Investors, Creators, Influencers, Users and Advertisers

Through crowd-sales, Flixxo is already trying to build the social economy that can sustain video creators, influencers, consumers, and advertisers. Flixxo’s target is to reach 50 million users in 10 years and give away an average of 10 tokens to each user. It plans to release around 275000 tokens on the first day. Then it will continue to release 75 tokens less than the day before to create a linearly decreasing token emission. It allows 20% inflation the first year, 13% inflation the second year and so on. As more content creators, influencers, and consumers join the network, it will create a thriving economy of content sharing.

Also, the token distribution will depend on user growth. If the user growth doesn’t reach expectations, proportionate tokens will be burned. E.g. Instead of expected 10,000 users, if there are only 5,000 users on the first day, then 50% of the 275,000 tokens will be burned. The rest will be distributed among the users and contributors as incentives. This ties inflation to the user growth. It also helps build a strong community through incentives and word-of-mouth.

A big attraction for advertisers is the way the incentives model work. The Flixx token incentives are distributed to gather new users. As new users come into the system the value of the tokens increase. It is in the interest of these new users to attract more users to further increase the value. This will create a word-of-mouth campaign where creators, influencers, and consumers will invite more users. Flixxo hopes to achieve exponential growth of the user base through this word-of-mouth campaigning which will kickstart the whole economy. The exponential growth of users should become an attractive feature of Flixxo for advertisers early on.

Last Words

Personally, I like what Flixxo is trying to achieve. Of course, pulling it off is going to be a challenge. But that’s why all of us are in the crypto-business, right? We want to explore possibilities and ideas that excite us.