We’re building a decentralized YouTube with micropayments.
I love making television. Working in Hollywood, I’ve spent the last decade or so making millions of people laugh, cry, and bang their heads. My livelihood has largely been underwritten by the revenue generated from advertising.
But something has always troubled me. For every hour of television I put on the air, only about 40 minutes of it is actual content. The rest is filled with commercials.
The average person will spend three years of their life watching ads.
That’s crazy! More to the point, it’s sad. Very sad. Life is so beautiful and so fleeting. You’d think we could find better uses of our time, right?
Yet, commercials do serve a very important purpose. The revenue they generate enables content creators to make stuff that’s worth watching. This ad-supported model started with radio in the 1920s and, as TV increasingly moves to the web, is continuing in the digital age.
The business model hasn’t changed for nearly 100 years!
What if there was a better way? Imagine a world where viewers and publishers were connected directly, without the need for advertising as an intermediate exchange of value. Tiny amounts of digital currency traveling in real-time on a global, peer-to-peer payment network would give content creators freedom and sustainability. Even more important, it would return to fans the life lost which would otherwise be spent watching commercials.
Micropayments aren’t about paying for content. They’re about reclaiming your most precious asset: your time
Ads are like smoking. Once you know the downsides, there are no more excuses to continuing. The moment I truly understood the transformative power of blockchain technology and saw the immediate potential to change the status quo in media distribution, I no longer had an excuse either. I had to do something.
That’s why I started PopChest, the open micropayments platform for video.
For the past few months, we’ve been testing all kinds of assumptions and ideas while in beta. Recent updates to the Bitcoin protocol will soon allow us to advance pioneering work done in 2014 on bitcoin micropayment channels by PopChest co-founder James Poole. In short, our original vision of building a commercial-free, community-focused, open platform for video is taking shape.
It sounds an impossible dream. Then again, we just saw a rocket land on a floating drone in the middle of the ocean. Nothing is impossible.
Ready to publish micropayments-enabled videos? Get started now!
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