Charlize Theron as Queen ‘Ravenna’

The team spent an interesting couple of days last week at Digital Entertainment World 2017 (DEW) in Los Angeles. The main mission of DEW-to be the organizational body for intellectual property rights holders from video, music, and publishing to access the entire digital value-chain of technology and service providers. At their mission’s core is working with digital distributors to create and monetize digital content across all significant platforms. Over those two days for us was an opportunity to pause, process and we hope contribute to this open dialogue. The message at every corner and quiet room remained-content is queen. A message that has rarely changed.

Today, content draws customers to business sites and eyeballs to media sites. It drives clicks, product sales and advertising dollars. Content makes the digital world go ‘round and smartphones have put all kinds of entertainment at the fingertips of billions across the planet-it’s not a sweet deal for everyone. Content may be queen, but content creators are more likely to be paupers. And yet the paupers are the true heroines of this story. In our story it is the filmmakers and the creators.

The only people who make money off of their own content are those rare talented individuals whose writing, music and movies would have paid off for them even before digital distribution and the lucky and well-placed few that have created greater access than before digital distribution was an option. The other 99% of online content is either free or close to it, and generated by users and media sites.

It’s not only having access to content that made the content industries powerful in the past, but also they had the most powerful distribution channels, including legal teams to strike and enforce licensing deals, and third party payment channels to collect. If you wanted to reach the widest audience, have your properties in all the media outlets, you needed to strike deals with them.

To now, independent content owners who didn’t want to strike these deals had to solve a multitude of issues — creating quality content, getting awareness among their target audiences, building distribution channels to fulfill the demand and collecting on micro-payments.

The most successful independents needed to master a variety of creative and business skills — which, although not impossible, happens rarely. Creatives have the tools of production on their computers. Via social media they can attract followers. With the blockchain, they can make the process of obtaining and paying for content, seamless and nearly instantaneous.

We are transforming the content creator’s world at SingularDTV and are building the tools that address this possibility. While we sat on a panel this year that was hidden in the deep recesses of the hotel basement asking “If Hollywood Needed Blockchain Technology,” we look forward to taking that conversation to the main stage. As the film industry evolves and streaming services become the dominant means of viewing, filmmakers rights and the flow of money within the industry is the single biggest challenge today’s filmmakers face, and with this initiative, we are addressing the issue head-on for today’s creators — and not simply uncovering existing issues — our goal is to bring together filmmakers, industry stakeholders, technologists, and others to push forward with crafting solutions in the near-term. We are putting the content creator and the decentralized tools of entertainment technology back into the role of heroine and pulling them out of the proverbial and hidden basement.

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