NFTs and the Death of Blu-Ray
The future arrives, about 15 years later than I expected.
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have drawn praise and disdain in equal measure since they hit the mainstream in March of this year. The seemingly endless variations of pixellated art and the staggering prices have caused many a jaw to drop. Yet underneath the hype and hysteria is a basic utility that is set to change the way in which we consume media and could lead to the death of disk-based delivery of media via Blu-Ray and CDs.
I cannot draw that conclusion without evidence, so let me take you on a journey that started for me back in 2004. At the time I was a telecoms/Internet consultant in the UK looking for new business opportunities, when I came across the first 3G phones that could play video. It was insanely expensive to deliver video to them through the cellular network, but I discovered that there were several other ways that I could get high quality video into the device without using the mobile network; via USB, via Bluetooth and on a memory card. I referred to these generically as “Sideloading” and with my business partner set up a company called Clippz which would offer content and a means of optimizing and delivering the video to an expanding range of devices.
The big question that we considered, was what the nature of the content should be? It needed to be quite short, just a few minutes, because of limited storage capability.
My favorite idea was to break down longer form content into bite-sized chunks and offer them for download and sideload. For example, instead of the entire Star Wars movie, you could just have a number of shorter scenes such as the attack on the Death Star. It seemed to me that there was a great opportunity for content rights-holders to monetize their back-catalog by cherry-picking the best scenes from movies and TV. I bounced from one meeting to another showing scenes from the Lord of the Rings trilogy running on my selection of mobile phones and advocating the creation of shorter clips (hence the company name).
Unfortunately, there were some problems, and chief amongst them was the lack of a consistent Digital Rights Management (DRM) system that would work across all of the devices that we supported, and so the potential for delivering high value content was diminished. Without DRM it would not be possible to ensure that content wasn’t copied and illegally distributed.
As a result, we directed Clippz toward user-generated videos, and it ran for 4 years before the arrival of the iPhone completely changed the market and removed the need for sideloading.
As an aside, don’t you miss the novelty of mobile phone design? I’m an Apple fan-boy, but all we get these days is maybe an extra camera lens. Bring back the spirit of Nokia!
Fast forward to 2016 and I started working on a new idea called LifeStories that would allow users to create their personal life stories by collecting and curating digital media from a wide variety of sources. Over the next three years I developed the concept and wrote the software for the iOS and Mac applications that would be its foundation.
In doing so, I discovered that the tools that I was creating could just as easily be applied to non-personal situations, such as creating an anthology for an artist, band, actor or collection of movies.
The ghost of Clippz stirred.
Here was an opportunity to combine the long and short formats, so you could include Star Wars in full, while also making all of the key scenes immediately accessible. You could include all of the material from a complete Blu-Ray box set in a way that was significantly more consumer-friendly than having to deal with a disk player and box of disks. There was also potential for including character and actor profiles and a host of supplementary content.
Although DVD player and disk sales were falling there was no evidence that the consumer wanted to give up on content ownership, it was simply that the disk format had become archaic. A new content format could reinvigorate the market and offer ownership and an upgraded experience, but once again the problem of DRM reared its head. In 2019, I had no experience with blockchain or cryptocurrencies and I couldn’t see a solution to the problem.
Earlier this year, the solution finally presented itself with the NFT. An NFT’s provenance is provided by the underlying blockchain, e.g the Ethereum network.
A blockchain can act as the DRM for a collection of media by providing proof of ownership. Having created an anthology of material, a rights-owner simply has to add the purchase transaction to the blockchain to allow the consumer to access the media, and then control the number of times that the NFT is installed.
arguably this stands to be the biggest change in home video ownership since the invention of the VCR, reversing what appeared to be a market in terminal decline.
The arrival of NFT-based media anthologies will surely be the final nail in the coffin for disk-based delivery. There should be no surprise in the demise of DVDs, Blu-Ray and CDs. The writing has been on the wall for years, with the continued adoption of streaming services and reduced volume of disk-based sales, but few would have expected the door to open for another form of content ownership.
NFT-based anthologies offer the potential for far higher levels of interactivity and media combinations than can be offered by the streaming giants, so is it possible that the balance of power is about to change? If this turns out to be the case, then arguably this stands to be the biggest change in home video ownership since the invention of the VCR, reversing what appeared to be a market in terminal decline.
Advocates of Blu-Ray may argue that its ability to handle 4K video will ensure that it remains relevant, and it is quite possible that this will be the last part of the ship to sink, but there’s no reason why an NFT cannot include 4K as long as that data is stored “off-chain” where only the transaction and the location of the assets are stored on the blockchain, not the assets themselves.
For optimum performance the assets should be stored on the device on which the anthology is to be viewed, or at least on a device that is connected to a display on which it could be viewed, and those assets will need a specific playback application. The Harry Potter anthology shown in the image above is in the region of 40GB which is already within the scope of what a lot of iOS devices can support, and they have a range of connection options for viewing the material on a larger display.
So the next time you see a story about a pixellated punk selling for a seven figure sum, remember that the same amazing utility that underpins that NFT is likely to change all of our lives in years to come.
