Flixxo — ICO Review

Token: FLIXX

ICO Start Date: October 24th

https://www.flixxo.com/

“A community based video distribution”

TOTAL 14.5 / 25

1Business opportunity: 3/5

Rationale behind the project:

• 70% of internet traffic is video (rise of VOD).
• Video business currently belongs to a few players (YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo, Netflix…).
• These traditional video platforms rely upon huge costs on storage and bandwidth.

As a consequence, issue is that users have access to only specific content (profitable and promoted content) and authors do not monetize the way they want.

Flixxo wants to create a new environment / business model, where users decide how to monetize their attention (rewards from looking sponsored content) and their personal assets (rewards from seeding content), and then transfer these rewards to the authors of the content they really enjoy. It is similar to BAT and its Brave browser, except that this latter is focused on web content (thus broader than just video — https://basicattentiontoken.org/).

Token:

• ERC20
• Used to reward users who lend their storage and their bandwidth (from their smartphones, tablets or desktops) to others or who look at sponsored content. Then users will spend the token to consume the content they really want to watch and earn tokens back for being social and promoting content (through seeding).
• Network effect: the more users will use the service, the more value the token will have
• Bonus: producers will be able to lock some of their tokens to get more visibility for the content they create.

Competitors: traditional players (Netflix, Youtube, etc.) which are huge, BAT ($143m market cap beg. November) even though it is focused on broader content than just videos, Twitch (streamers already get tips when broadcasting videos).

Use case:

• David put his film named IBBC on the Flixxo platform and fixes a price at 100 Flixx and decides to share revenue at 50% with network if there are multiple seeders.
• Paul registers on Flixxo, watches IBBC and pay 100 Flixx to David. He also decides to seed the movie.
• Yacine also registers on Flixxo and pays to watch the film.
• David will get 75 Flixx (in addition to the first 100), Paul 25 and Yacine 25 (as he seeds it by downloading it as well). Yacine can also watch sponsored videos from Company A and earn 9 Flixx (1 Flixx going as a fee to Flixxo) that he is going to spend to watch other movies.

Questions:

• Same questions that have already been raised for the BAT project: will user adopt this new business model, i.e. accepting to pay for quality content? Will users accept to look at videos just for the sake of earning tokens (despite the study conducted by Jun Group mentioned in the Whitepaper)?
• Since Netflix and others start producing and distributing their own content, how to get access to that content?
• Go-to-market strategy (subsidize some content, invite key YouTubers) not detailed enough. How to fight against Youtube and Netflix that are already mastodons? They have announced partnerships with Stremio and Popcorn Time (Netflix’s competitors) but no details.

2Technology: 2.5/5

Whitepaper: https://www.flixxo.com/assets/docs/flixxo-white-paper_v0.5.pdf

• Flixxo is an app (smartphones, tablets) and also has a desktop and a web version
• Flixxo will use the BitTorrent protocol allowing P2P file sharing.

It is one the most common protocols to transfer large files. The positive point here is that BitTorrent has already proved to be a scalable solution that is currently working (45M+ users downloading torrents every day). It enables to store files with very reduced costs.

To deal with piracy and war between major studios and BitTorrent networks prevented these technologies from becoming mainstream, here, the token Flixx will incentivize users to seed legal content and get a channel to connect directly with content producers (studios).

No technical challenge (related to blockchain) here: should not be difficult to achieve. We would have loved to see MVP or prototypes of the app but it seems not to be ready yet.

Product ready for Q2 2018, which seems reasonable.

3Team: 4/5

• Adrian Garelik: CEO: background in cinema. Seems to be a producer. No track-record in blockchain. Nothing before 2015 on Linkedin…
• Pablo Carbajo: CTO: was a developer at Riecoin (which is an altcoin). Significant experience in blockchain. Riecoin has $2.5m market cap.
• Federico Abad: Designer: designed Popcorn Time

Good point: CTO knows about blockchain and has already built a coin. They already have a guy who knows about UX/UI (Popcorn Time). Very complementary.

4ICO details: 2.5/5

• 900m tokens will be issued. 200m for the ICO. Out of these 200m, 66M can be sold to strategic investors (pre-sale).
• 1 ETH = 4000 Flixx
• ~$12.5m market cap (excluding tokens not available for the ICO)
• ~$56m market cap overall

Some bonus (30% for the first 24h, 25% for a week, 20% during the second week, 15% during the third one and 10% during the last one) but this is not excessive.

Most of the tokens (500m) will be used as reward to build mass adoption and reward users of the platform, which is a huge chunk of the total amount of supply…

5Community & Communication: 3/5

2500 members early November on Telegram.

Interesting medium with a lot of articles (https://medium.com/@flixxo). Good communication around the project, around the industry.

3000 followers on Twitter.

6Verdict

• Short-term: neutral
• Long-term: negative

The project wants to enter a lucrative industry but where mastodons (YouTube, Netflix) are already in place. Very complementary team that has the skills needed for the project (CTO has already built a coin, UX guy has designed Popcorn Time). Most of the tokens will be distributed to users in a way to incentivize them to use the platform (will people want to buy tokens in that situation?). As always, project seems ambitious and creates a smart eco-system that looks good on the paper. However, what about user adoption? How to really convince people to switch from Youtube and Netflix where the service is excellent? No detailed go-to-market plan, which should be at the heart of that type of projects.

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