Collaboration Changes Everything
So how exactly do we engage more with super-fans and their content?
There’s a crucial distinction between an attention economy versus an intention economy.
We’re borrowing the below two lines from a brilliant thread we stumbled upon:
Attention is when your audience takes notice of you.
Intention is when your audience is willing to take action for you.
The future we envision at Sagaverse is not about making money from your community, but about creating your own economy with them — your superfans.
We’ll kickstart this write-up in two easy parts. Starting with a brief overview of what we do and why engagement matters. And ending with a more technical write-up on how we are enabling this.
The biggest thing in content creation today is creating blended content, which is the result of collaborative creation mixing different types of media.
Across the web, content is being combined to create new and exciting experiences. By adding audio tracks to video, songs are discovered through Tik Tok dances. Images and popular comments are turned into video memes and gifs on Reddit. Epic gaming moments are immortalized by fan art and video remixes. Sports highlights are turned into NFTs, like NBA Top Shots, worth billions. Video already accounts for 85% of internet traffic. You can feel that something new is about to explode.
It’s obvious that Web3 users want to create together. We see collaborative media as the future. But to unlock this future, two big problems need to be solved. The first is, “How do you make it so easy for anyone to create with next-generation media?” The second is, “If people co-create, then how do you account for who owns what?”
Our Solution
We have a solution to both problems. Central to Sagaverse is its blockchain protocol, which describes attribution and ensures licensing information is carried along and terms are always honored.
The protocol consists of two main components:
- A Media Engine that gives users an intuitive creation canvas, allowing for real-time collaboration and creation with video with next-generation content, including 3D;
- A Media Manifest for composing, distributing, and recomposing tokenized assets while retaining attribution, licensing information, and no duplication of assets.
The Big Opportunities We Make Possible
Put it all together and what we’re doing is unlocking collaborative media using augmented and 3D video. We know this is the next content format that people will love and want in their lives. The possibilities that our protocol can unlock are endless.
Who Wins With Our Protocol
- Digital Collectors
Fans are amassing collections of NFTs and 3D content from Web3 games that currently live in dead ends but could be used for monetization and co-creation. Our protocol makes it easy for collectors to allow others to license their assets. We give monetization to assets that would otherwise live at dead ends.
2. Fandom
The Sagaverse protocol will change fandom. For creators, there’s nothing more powerful than a fan and what fans crave most is meaningful interaction and connection.
We make it easy for co-creation to happen. For example, fans can remix a Twitch stream that is digitally autographed by a creator. When fans become co-owners, they help co-monetize and co-distribute content, this helps creators get higher engagement, monetization, and reach (distribution).
3. Brands
Traditionally, brands have been managed in a centralized way, with every aspect tightly controlled. A key trend is that of headless brands, where increasingly consumers are experiencing brands through a third party like a creator or a community, in other words, brands are no longer controlled and defined in a centralized way. They take a life of their own with community dynamics. In these communities creators are often at the center, hence creators are leading this shift to headless brands. This reinvents what a brand is and how it should behave. It also changes advertising. We believe that in the near future, advertising will evolve in the direction of authentic content co-creation between brands, creators, and fans.
We don’t think the future is injected ads in social feeds as we see today. We believe Web3 will bring new monetization models beyond Cost per Click + Cost per Impression or paying creators to produce content. Clicks and views are not the future, instead, engagement is. We believe the future is fan-creator and fan-creator-brand collaborations. It’s much more powerful that a user creates a remix with Star Wars content than if they watch ads for Disney+.
A second, a like, a comment, a remix, a collaboration — everything counts and generates value.
Technical
- Sagaverse blurb:
Collaborative creation with tokenized blended media assets requires a canvas merging creation and consumption, and it requires an open protocol for attribution.
Sagaverse is building a protocol to solve this on top of existing layer 1 blockchains. Providing a collaborative rich media canvas, merging creation and consumption, and an open cross-chain attribution protocol.
2. Technical Solution Abstract:
Rich media and the promotion of derivative works to first-class citizens of Web3 provide new opportunities for creator monetization. This requires rethinking the role of the media player and traditional content creation pipelines. We present a possible solution to problems currently facing content creators by the extension of NFT standards to comprise attribution and licensing information, and the introduction of a new rich media player — editor, and format native to Web3.
3. Detailed Technical Problem:
NFTs have a huge potential beyond just “digital collectibles”. However, to make the prosumer a first-class citizen of Web3 requires more than just extending the NFT protocols of today.
Maintaining attribution in collaborative creations and derivative content and ensuring licensing rights are honored requires rethinking traditional content creation pipelines as a whole. The merging of consumption and creation also means the media player takes on some of the tasks traditionally found in external tools and pipelines.
New forms of rich media content also need to be seamlessly integrated into the content creation pipeline. This is the type of content where traditional “plain” media formats have proven too limited: They lack support for interaction and new content types, and embedding is always lossy. HTML solves some of these issues, but ends up on the other side of the spectrum for being too general; it is a poor fit for time-based media, lacks the kind of editor support expected by creators of plain media, and suffers from limited composability and ever-growing fragmentation.
Finally, the duplication of data and re-encoding that typically happens when an asset is used in a derivative work puts an unnecessary strain on the environment and forces hosting providers to essentially host the same data over and over again. Making the prosumer a first-class citizen of Web3 means distributing the composition as a first-class asset, thereby avoiding some of the problems caused by encoding and distributing traditional video.
In summary:
- There is a need for a lossless and rich — yet editable and composable — media format;
- The link between assets and their derivatives needs to be preserved;
- A cross-chain source of truth for asset attribution and licensing information is needed;
- Maintaining such a model needs to be automatic and integrated into a rich content creation pipeline;
- Honoring such a model needs to be automatic and integrated into a rich media player;
- Enabling collaborative creation and merging consumption with creation means the media player itself becomes part of the content creation pipeline.
Proposed technical solution:
NFT protocols enable a unified programmatic licensing rights layer, offering an alternative way of solving monetization, where the inherent utility of the internet can be used as an advantage.
To achieve this, we are proposing a solution that allows users to consume and create rich interactive audio-visual content and monetize its usage in derivative works, in addition to traditional one-off sales transactions. Our proposed solution can be broken down into four parts:
- An extension to existing NFT standards, linking each NFT to a standardized cross-chain asset attribution manifest;
- An open and extendable format for rich media;
- A rich media player allowing the creation of derivative works while maintaining the attribution information and honoring diverse licensing models defined in the asset attribution manifests;
- A DAO maintaining a cross-platform canvas, protocol, and supporting services implementing the above for the end-user, collectively known as the Sagaverse platform.
