Is blockchain a boon -- or just a lot of bullsh*t?

Yes, it's a provocative headline, but this is the internet, so the more extreme the statement, the more likely people are to pay attention to it.  Or so they say.

So...do I personally believe that blockchain is a lot of bullsh*t?

Actually no. I remain hopeful. Even though there are plenty of informed naysayers and plenty of technical and regulatory hurdles to be cleared. Not unlike the consumer internet of 25-ish years ago we're not yet sure what the decentralized ledger of blockchain is best suited for. For those reading this post in, say, 2040, you're probably getting a good laugh. Then again, one of the initial visions for personal computers was to store recipes in the home. So keep that in mind as you chuckle away, people of the future.

My personal blockchain hurricane started a few weeks ago when I posted this piece about the potential for blockchain in the creative industries, citing examples such as the facilitation of micropayments  and a more streamlined way to attribute rights and in turn royalties. There was also a reference to a a $30 million movie able to be made for about $5 million, with all the middleman workarounds that could become available via blockchain. Is that an overstatement? Perhaps. But then again, there's a thing called Hollywood accounting, an entrenched system that all but guarantees that a project, regardless of how many hundreds of millions of dollars it generates, becomes profitable. One would think it's reasonable to assume that a public, distributed ledger, where all the accounts are held, would be kryptonite to the old, bloated system. And that's just one example.

But back to our story. I tweeted out a link to my blog post about blockchain and the entertainment industry, and in fairly short order heard back from practitioners and technologists currently investigating blockchain solutions. And let's just say this group is skeptical about much of the blockchain promise.

In the interest of providing as balanced a perspective as possible here on the blog, I wanted to capture those thoughts and arguments here, so they're all contained in one place. The full thread can be accessed at this link, and a subsequent article on the dubious benefits of blockchain for creators can be found here. What follows are some highlights the Twitter thread. I hope these comments will pique your interest enough to look at the full thread, to look into the work of those tweeting, and to give some serious consideration to the points raised.

That last tweet comes from one of the most high profile shade throwers in the blockchain game, David Gerard. His book, Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain, has been called “a sober riposte to all the upbeat forecasts" by the New York Review of Books.

And then there's Harvard computer science professor James Mickens, who recently did a lightning talk with the provocative and prodding title Blockchains are a bad idea. More specifically, blockchains are a very bad idea. 

And yet, I still want to believe in the power of disintermediation.

The group of Davids taking on Streaming Goliaths Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu

A consortium of documentary buyers is taking on Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and other streaming giants. Here's how, and why, they're doing it.

As over-the-top (OTT) providers grow their subscriber bases around the world, billions are being invested in content acquisition. For 2018, Amazon Prime Video has earmarked $5 billion and Netflix has budgeted $8 billion for creating and licensing new shows.

Not surprisingly, the top-of-mind question for many producers is whether or not reaching a deal with one of the streaming giants is the way to go in what is becoming a post-broadcast world. The budgets are sizeable, the reach is global and the subscriber base is only going to get bigger over time. However, there are trade-offs, of course, the most significant of which is that ownership rights must often be handed over.

Enter the International Buyer’s Coalition, a consortium of global documentary buyers that came into being at Sundance 2016 where it made its first acquisition, Nanfu Yang's Hooligan Sparrow. 

The coalition includes PBS’s Independent Lens, BBC’s Storyville, The Netherlands’s VPRO, Israel’s DBS/YesDocu, Denmark’s DR, Norway’s NRK, Ireland’s RTE, Spain’s Telefónica, Belgium’s VRT and Sweden’s SVT. This initiative is part of a global movement toward strategic alliance-making between legacy media to counterbalance the power of Netflix and Amazon. Other ecent examples include the European Media Alliance and the France Télévisions–RAI–ZDF partnership.

Speaking recently at the annual Hot Docs documentary conference in Toronto, Ro*co Films’ Annie Roney, one of the driving forces behind the International Buyers’ Coalition, admitted that despite the pooling of multiple players’ budgets, it was unlikely that the coalition could come close to matching the financial enticements of major OTT providers.

So why even try? It turns out there are advantages to working with public service broadcasters.

Mandy Chang, commissioning editor for BBC’s Storyville, and a coalition member, sees the group as embodying the spirit of public service broadcasting: people and organizations centered around a shared goal of telling important stories and getting those stories out to as many people as possible.

Lois Vossen of PBS’s Independent Lens, another coalition member, noted that she had witnessed firsthand the frustrations of filmmakers who believed in the importance of having a broadcast window for their documentaries, generally on public media. However, the terms and conditions of Netflix’s deals prevented such airings.

The coalition therefore fills a blank space for documentary producers, where competing with the major streaming platforms happens not in terms of dollars but of deal terms. 

The benefits of working with the coalition include the following: 

• One-stop shopping for multi-region deals
• Rights and ownership retention
• On-the-ground marketing and publicity support
• Versioning assistance
• Data on a film’s impact both online and offline 

A recent International Buyers’ Coalition acquisition was The Fourth Estate, a 4-part series documenting a year inside the New York Times’s coverage of the first 18 months of the Trump presidency.

The Fourth Estate was the closing night selection at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival and will be aired on Showtime in the US, the BBC in the UK and RTE in Ireland. A different edit of the series was made for the Irish national broadcaster to better speak to the knowledge level of viewers there. According to BBC’s Mandy Chung, “this kind of collaboration is very rare these days”, adding that it is what sets public media apart in a world where a handful of streaming platforms are imposing new rules and norms.

“If a filmmaker’s first priority is revenue and a Netflix Original offer is on the table, a coalition offer won’t compete,” said Annie Roney. “But if a filmmaker is also interested in a film’s impact and developing their relationship with the international broadcast community, a coalition offer can prove to be competitive.”


Note: This is an edited version of a post that originally appeared on the Trends blog.