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How Blockchain Could Kill Both Cable and Netflix

venturebeat.com

8 points by mcknz 8 years ago · 24 comments

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mcphage 8 years ago

This is one of the dumbest articles I've read in a long time.

> Content creators could create shows and make them available over a decentralized platform instantly – no need to go pitch a studio or try to get Netflix to put you on their system. No more gatekeepers that have to approve your content.

When you go to a network, or Amazon, or Netflix, part of what you get is distribution. But that's not what you go to them for. You go to them for MONEY, since producing high-end media content is expensive. And in exchange for their money, you agree to only distribute that content on their network.

But without the money to produce the content, the rest is meaningless.

  • dawnerd 8 years ago

    Article is clearly written by someone that hasn’t worked in content production.

  • geodel 8 years ago

    Yup. You can produce to millions of dollars of content out of thin air, meanwhile we have have "sharing economy" to rent screwdrivers so you don't spend 5 bucks on buying it.

  • autokad 8 years ago

    in 2007ish, there was lots of new content creators coming on the scene, but often producing 8 minute episodes.

    I found them quiet enjoyable, like 'the guild', but a lot of people struggle with the idea of watching something so short. I had to twist arms to get people to watch it. once they did, they enjoyed it a lot, but were still unwilling to watch content of that length. unfortunately, I think short works much better for independent content producers.

    • mcphage 8 years ago

      > unfortunately, I think short works much better for independent content producers

      I agree, that size video is great for independent producers. But there will always be demand for large spectacle productions, and for the foreseeable future, those will cost large amounts of money. Simpler distribution won't—can't—help with that.

donarb 8 years ago

There's no how there. Just a bunch of hand-wavy stuff. They talk about the freedom of content providers to go around Netflix and Amazon, but in a lot of cases those companies provide money to content creators to produce the shows, not just distribution to customers. They make it sound as though you can crowd source production costs after the fact using tokens. Good luck with that.

Reminds me of the old Slashdot meme: 1) Blockchain 2) ??? 3) Profit!

  • slowmovintarget 8 years ago

    You've revealed the Blockchain gnomes' secret business plan!

    I'm guessing Netflix will be fine, especially if the rumors of them being bought out by Apple are true.

kneel 8 years ago

How clickbait could kill both discourse and logic.

It seems like people randomly generate an article title from buzzword soup, write it up and call it a day.

What a time to be alive.

thriftwy 8 years ago

Did they just invent BitTorrent?

It doesn't have blockchain to be precise, which won't hurt IMO because discovery becomes more problematic with time. But the rest of stuff is here.

  • autokad 8 years ago

    i guess other peer to peer networks, you can always bring a person to court over sharing something. Whereas blockchain it can be more anonymous and content can be split on many machines?

    Let me know if i am thinking of this right. i think we all could use a little more clarification on how this changes things over existing techs

    • thriftwy 8 years ago

      Whereas with blockchain you can bring everybody to court because they all share the same infringing material.

      There was a long discusion about what happens when blockchain contains some piece of information That Is Forbidden To Possess. You could probably claim you didn't have the intent. But with Pirate Blockchain you sure do.

krautsourced 8 years ago

How does content distribution in any way relate to blockchains? If there's a point here, I seem to be missing it entirely.

  • t0mbstone 8 years ago

    It's literally just peer to peer networking and computation, but paying people to participate by programmatically doling out crypto currency to people who are contributing.

    This isn't bittorrent. It's not blockchain. It's kind of a weird hybrid of the two.

    It's actually a really brilliant idea, if they pull it off correctly.

    The article is completely written like shit, though.

    Check out:

    https://livepeer.org/

    https://viuly.com/

    • dogma1138 8 years ago

      Someone needs to product the content it doesn’t materializes out of the ether.

      The distribution itself is not a problem the blockchain can solve or should solve it just adds an unnecessary cost on top of other method of distribution.

      • t0mbstone 8 years ago

        You're right. It would probably make more sense to just have a peer to peer storage and computation network with a bidder/buyer market (which could accept everything from USD to any random crypto-currency). There's no good reason to have the system built on a blockchain.

  • loverofthings 8 years ago

    I guess seeding is like proof of stake. Although who knows what is the currency.

FrozenTuna 8 years ago

Why would I run a node on something like this? What's the incentive?

It breaks down 4 benefits:

Free up content creators. Sure, or they could, you know, throw it up on youtube, twitch, vimeo, or any other centralized app.

New channels. This is just shit writing. This is 90% the same thing as bullet 1.

Advertising and Free Content. Again, see all the other centralized apps. Also, there would 100% need to be a middle man. Thats what a decentralized block chain is. Hosting a blockchain has costs. Especially something as space consuming as video hosting.

Paid Content. Still a problem already solved by not being on a decentralized application. I can't wrap my head around why someone wouldn't just host their own content if they have anywhere near enough money to produce content good enough to charge for.

TYPE_FASTER 8 years ago

Napster, plus a way to monetize the content? That's how I read the beginner doc on the LivePeer site this article links to.

"Livepeer’s peer-to-peer network lets you stream what you want, when you want, without a single point of failure or censorship."

Yeah, that's just plain ol' P2P. Blockchain is distributing a public list of transactions via P2P. Livepeer is using a blockchain to record streaming transactions, and pay the node responsible for streaming.

itaris 8 years ago

I fail to see what advantage this holds over YouTube.

fuddcoinn 8 years ago

I'm of the opinion that as long as youtube doesn't make profit then anything is possible.

fabiofzero 8 years ago

I took time to write a well-researched response to this. https://medium.com/@fzero/blockchain-blockchain-6c5d60923050

__m 8 years ago

How to make coffee with blockchain

knodi 8 years ago

-_- what a silly article.

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