Mission of Decentralized Video Platforms
Most of the decentralized video network projects are pointing at the same flaws, injustices, and inefficiencies of the current video distribution industry. They all want to solve similar problems. Their analyses are similar enough that no distinction will be made between the different projects just yet. Lets just consider for now that all speak of one voice: the decentralized video projects have identified the biggest problem with the curent industry to be…
Pain Point 1: Centralization!
Monopoly
With combined market share of about 90% of the online video platform market, Youtube (75%) and Vimeo (15%) leave very little space for the competition. This gives tremendous power to those platforms to dictate the monetization methods, how much the content creator gets and how much the advertiser pays.
The concentration of power is even more visible with traditional broadcast networks or with more recent platforms like Netflix, which are accessible to a very limited group of content creators (big studios) and advertisers.
Content quality
It is argued in many of those project’s whitepapers that Youtube’s primary goal is not to share and distribute videos, its ultimate purpose is to show ads. In order to fulfill this mission, Youtube incentivizes creators to submit videos as frequently as possible, giving the video giant more opportunities to serve ads to viewers. This results in the lower quality of the videos being promoted by the platform since daily productions can’t be as polished. On the other end, content that take longer to produce (arguably more refined, or being the result of more thorough research) doesn’t get as much exposure and creators with high view counts but low submit rate get smaller returns.
Advertising revenue distribution
Being an intermediary between the content creator, the user and (sometime) the advertiser, the big players are able to strong-arm all the other participants in the market to accept their conditions. The content creator only has so many broadcast or streaming platforms he can go to to submit its content. The market as it is today is especially hard for the smaller creators who are forced to accept prices and conditions imposed to them. This is how Youtube can change monetization conditions overnights or keep about 60% of the advertising revenue generated by a video for example.
Content selection
Platforms like Youtube and Vimeo, do decentralize one thing though: the content source. Using an online video platform, anybody with a smartphone can now upload a video and make it available to the world, even if the revenue distribution can be considered unfair. Other distribution platforms, like traditional broadcast TV, Hulu, or Netflix, are practically inaccessible to most content creators. And the fact that Netflix is now transforming into a modern day studio further limit outsiders options as it now pushes mainly its own productions.
There is still an important part of the industry where a very small group of people is responsible for the content selection, allowing mostly big studios, established journalists and show hosts to be broadcasted.
selecting which journalist or commentator gets higher visibility can be (is!) a very powerful tool to control the public opinion
Beside entertainment, promoting a specific point of view, preventing the diffusion of some ideas or even censoring them, selecting which journalist or commentator gets higher visibility can be (is!) a very powerful tool to control the public opinion.
The decentralized video platform projects offer to empower all of the participants in the industry, to let the entire market make direct connections in order to establish prices, revenue distribution, content selection, advertising model, etc… Additionally, a truly decentralized infrastructure is a lot more resilient to attacks and is a harder to shut down or censor as there is no single point of failure to be targeted.
Pain Point 2: Growing infrastructure requirements
Standards & devices
The economics is not the only aspect that the decentralized video platforms are aiming to improve. The increasing amount of digital content being produced combined with the ever higher resolution standards 4k, 8k and VR, as well as the increasing number of devices to be supported, are making the requirements in infrastructure and bandwidth grow exponentially.
Scalability
In order to deliver high quality videos, either live or VOD, to any kind of devices — TVs, smart phones, tablets, computers — current distribution platforms need to make huge investments in infrastructure in order to transcode, store and stream content. The content distribution networks (CDN) provide this expensive service. But how well can this model scale? The objective of a decentralized video distribution platform is to open the function of CDN to anybody in order to leverage the computing power available outside of the specialized platforms. Anywhere. On top of augmenting the capacity of the traditional CDN networks in terms of processing power and storage, a decentralized CDN would improve the viewing experience in areas where traditional platforms do not usually invest.
People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones
So yes, blockchain projects are having a go at the current video distribution industry for its lack of scalability. Let’s look pass the irony and consider that within the next few years, the bandwidth requirements to provide a service of quality will exceed the capacity of the traditional distribution networks (or will be very expensive to achieve). Lets also assume that the blockchains will have solved their own scalability issues by then. (We’ll add this to the list of assumptions implied throughout the article).
While this is all theoretical right now, the theory is quite attractive. Turning many (all?) consumer nodes into an active part of the ecosystem is a very interesting idea. An infrastructure which grows more powerful and efficient as it increases in size, while sharing the technical and economical benefits fairly among all participants is a powerful concept. This might sound like a utopia, but one that is worth pursuing.
