I´m a filmmaker. I make movies, I´m a storyteller. But I´m also curious on new technologies and in 1998 I´ve started Dyzo, a company which focused on digital entertainment (video streaming and gaming) It was the time when everybody was trying to .com everything, but it was too soon for video (and I was too young), so I´ve made some money with the games and the project was eventually abandoned.

Around 2007 the movie distribution business — in theaters — changed a 100% with the implementation of DLP projectors, turning theaters from analog to digital. That was a real revolution and I wanted to participate. I was running a DVD rental store franchise then, and one of my clients turned to be a streaming expert, so we tried to create a platform for a democratic movie distribution to cinemas, called CinePop. But the technology for creating such a distribution channel was not available at that time, so we eventually abandoned the project.

Some years after that, my yoga instructor put a sign on his studio that said “We take Bitcoin” I´ve had heard of Bitcoin before, but that sign on the most unexpected place opened my eyes — and blown my mind —

I´ve started reading all about Bitcoin. In Buenos Aires there is a great Bitcoin community — having a financial system like ours turned all Argentinians super creative when it comes to money — and I started to participate in meet ups. I had decided to create something on top of Bitcoin for financing and distributing films. I Meet some guys who introduced some other guys, someone spoke me about Sergio Lerner and I meet him too. Brought some friends who were vanilla developers — one of them was my partner in the times of Dyzo — and teamed them with Sergio. My partner in CinePop, Diego Gutierrez-Zaldivar, turned to be the president of the NGO Bitcoin Argentina, and I invited him to join our project too. And we ended founding RSK Labs.

When speaking on blockchain and smart contracts, everybody was envisioning financial tools. But as blockchain can help us settle value without intermediaries and smart contracts allow us to set rules on that value, I turned back to my obsession: content is a value, and content licenses are the rules tied to that value. That concept could turn the whole entertainment industry upside down, that´s the main idea behind the Blockchainment concept. At that moment I´ve found out that the technology I had been looking for the last 15 years, a tool that would let me build a decentralized and democratic video environment, was finally at the reach of my hand.

So I started to contact every single project related to Blockchainment, and told them about the potential of smart contracts. They were all focused on micropayments and I knew there were much more possibilities than that.

I´ve left daily operations in RSK to focus on Blockchainment. Teamed up with Federico Abad, the creator of Popcorn Time, and with a really smart crypto expert, Pablo Carbajo. We were super lucky to bring Javier D´Ovidio to our team, and we started to develop Flixxo, a decentralized and incentivized network for distributing and monetizing video.

We know we have some competitors around, so we wanted to assess which points we have in common and what makes Flixxo unique.

LBRY

LBRY concept is similar to Flixxo, it is a decentralized video platform using IPFS. However the UX/UI seems to have a big learning curve both for Authors and for Users. It is not clear where Users would get their tokens for using the platform even though it says it will pay its users for sharing content (which is not happening on their alpha). As LBRY is running its own blockchain, Users could mine its token, but again the learning curve is huge and it is a task that will not be achieved by Average Joe without programming knowledge. There is no advertisement.

POPCHEST

Popchest is a nice project, I´ve meet both founders Valerian and Ariel when I was on RSK. Although we share a vision, they still focus on micropayments. They were gathering a lot of content for their platform which is awesome, and they have proved that blockchain would help authors to monetize better than on traditional platforms. In the future they could try to create a P2P network for distribution. There are no ADS on their platform at all. I would really love to partner with them!

DECENT.CH

Decent is a protocol for publishing and sharing digital data, leaning on a decentralized and encrypted network. Right now it is not more than that. Buy their roadmap includes apps and an app store for next year, so other projects like Flixxo could be built on top of the protocol.

SINGULAR DTV

I cannot say much about them. They had a good ICO last year, which eventually became a lot of money. They´ve removed the White Paper from their website and promised to launch last June and show the new White Paper. On their words they are “Building the future of rights management, project funding, and peer-to-peer distribution”, which means they would try to do everything at the same time. There is a video on their website that shows the moment of their fundraising, and when they reach their goal someone on their team screams “Let´s go make some fuckin´movies!” So I would expect them to become, mostly, a production company.

Many other projects such as Alexandria or Smoogs seem to be abandoned. Others like DTube of View.ly are still developing prototypes, both on top of Steem. Some off-chain guys tried to ICO a project called TheFlik without much success. Probably other projects will be announced in the next months. There is space for many of us here, as we are building not an app-war but an ecosystem. Every project has the potential of leveraging the other projects.

Flixxo´s alpha in action. This user is downloading and streaming the short film “Luminaris” from 3 other real users.

Meanwhile we are still developing the platform, reaching authors and working hard on the upcoming Token Sale. Yesterday we showcased the platform in front of 150 people in Amsterdam and it was a great success. The feedback was awesome: everybody liked the fact that it is super easy to understand what is happening, how users and authors are monetizing. It is just an alpha, but UX/UI is the key player here for reaching a massive audience.

Adrian Garelik, CEO of FLIXXO