“Is Bitcoin legit?”; and other FAQs sourced from telling people what we do at Custos
It’s like our Chief Economist ‘slash’ COO, Fred Lutz, always says:
While everyone’s hodling through this bear market, we will buidl.
Wait, you use blockchain to do what now?
At Custos Media Technologies, we use a combination of forensic watermarking, blockchain tech, and AWS cloud storage infrastructure to build secure content hosting and sharing platforms for media owners and distributors anywhere in the world.
Our patented blockchain-based infringement monitoring technology allows media owners to rapidly discover when their content leaked, and where the infringement originated.
Custos’s flagship product is its enterprise integration service for digital media protection. Clients who wish to protect video, audio, ebooks, or documents can integrate with Custos’s blockchain-based API to register, assign, and monitor media items — with minimal impact on their existing workflow.
How did the idea for this technology come about?
Media distribution is broken.
Movies, ebooks, software — are still being distributed using a paradigm from the 20th century: that the creator has, for the greater part, control over who receives the content, and that unlicensed duplication and distribution is difficult and rare enough to be managed.
The cornerstone of this paradigm is intellectual “property”, because physical property has these properties of controlled distribution and costly duplication.
However, in the 21st century, this concept has become dangerously broken.
Large and expensive digital assets are copied with impunity, and distributed globally. Media creators have little recourse once files are shared on the internet, because the prolific sharing happens largely anonymously, and often outside jurisdictions where owners can enforce media rights.
Custos was developed at the MIH Media Lab at Stellenbosch University in 2014 to solve this challenge.
Why use bitcoin?
The nice thing about building on the blockchain is that it does not rely on the price of any cryptocurrency or token, so our solution remains equally effective through the waxing and waning of the markets.
Again, Fred Lutz fields this one nicely:
When we developed the technology, it was still the early days of blockchain technology. Ethereum had not launched yet, our options were restricted to a couple of Bitcoin or Litecoin copies. We opted for Bitcoin because of the support infrastructure available at the time. Over the years we have seen the industry booming, and attitudes to it changing in a great way.
When we started we were frequently had to defend our choice in using ‘internet drug money,’ as made famous by the Silk Road. Last year there was a massive boom in ICOs and we received various requests to invest in Custos Coin when it launches (which is not currently on the roadmap). After all the hype and the hundreds of scams, we are now seeing larger industry players showing interest in Custos as a company that has an actual real-world profit generating application for blockchain technology with VC and institutional backing.
Does it work?
Depending on what market you are in, between 20% and 60% of screener copies (early release copies of movies) are leaked. We have taken that down to zero in every market we have entered, all with the power of the blockchain.
In April we celebrated our 100,000th copy of a film protected by Custos’ blockchain technology. At the time, we had not had a single pirated leak. It turned out that the warning about the tracking technology embedded in each recipient’s copy was enough to deter piracy for all would-be pirates.
The number of protected copies has since increased to over 160,000, and [drumroll] we caught some pirates!
Custos is the first company in the world to use blockchain technology to catch a pirate red-handed.
This is big news both for the blockchain and media industries.
But how exactly does it work?
Say you are a filmmaker, and you have just finished editing your final copy of a movie. You want to drive up the hype so you want to get it in front of some reviewers. You go on screenercopy.com, upload your movie, and input the emails addresses of some reviewers that you know.
On the back end, the platform generates unique copies for each reviewer. In each copy, using cutting edge forensic watermarking, we embed a Bitcoin wallet. A Bitcoin wallet is just a special string of numbers.
This number is not visible to a viewer, but encoded into small variations in the colour and brightness that a human eye won’t be able to see, but that will remain in the copy even if you copy or compress it.
In each Bitcoin wallet there’s a bit of Bitcoin. Any one in the world that finds a copy in the wild can take this Bitcoin as their reward, and through the blockchain we are informed whose copy was found somewhere it should not have been.
The above example speaks to the fact that smaller movie producers typically do not have their own distribution platforms, and require a solution to replace less secure online video sharing services.
Screener Copy is Custos’s SaaS service for independent film producers. A Screener Copy user can simply upload content, and nominate a list of recipients. Custos protection is added to each copy.
In a larger-scale example, a Tokyo-based client of ours uses a custom-branded, white-labeled SaaS product we built for secure distribution of movie screeners to a network of buyers across Japan.
There are a lot of exciting developments happening in the Blockchain for media space.
Ujo Team for example, is tackling royalty payments in the media industry with big customers like Imogen Heap and RAC already onboard. PopChest is making a blockchain-based YouTube competitor which makes it easier for creatives to monetise their content. ascribe tracks ownership of digtal artworks on a blockchain. And SingularDTV is trying to replace the old film studio model with a tokenised economy.
It’s an exciting new world, and Custos is positioned to become the protection layer for all of these digital assets and the distribution platforms helping drive sustainable, piracy-free profitability in creative industries especially. 🤞
TL; DR: Custos builds secure content hosting and sharing platforms for owners and distributors of digital media. Our patented blockchain-based infringement monitoring technology allows media owners to rapidly discover when their content leaked, and where the infringement originated.
