Everybody Wants to Get Into the NFT Act!

Technology and content go hand-in-hand. Content creators and creatives must also be technologists with expertise over the tech that powers their mediums.

But when it comes to NFTs, it’s a brand-new world for many.

In the first half of 2021, NFTs uncovered a new path for creators to monetize their creativity and we saw a breadth of experimentation. We are now in a period where heightened expectation is intersecting with a more stringent eye toward more strategic concerns, be it the right enablement platforms, partnerships, or utility.

Since VideoCoin released its Alpha code in July, we are fielding interest from the broad entertainment and media space as content creators — individuals and companies alike — try to understand how the technology can power their artistic or entertainment visions.

In this post, we’d like to share some of the use cases we are hearing about and show how NFTs are a powerful artistic, entertainment, and business medium.

Influencers

Influencers are the most prolific content creators in the game today. The latest data reveals there are an estimated 3.2 million — 37.8 million influencers exist across three leading media platforms: Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. Not only do their fans expect frequent updates, but the algorithms that drive the business model of streaming platforms like Twitch and YouTube demand frequent postings to drive views, engagement, and ultimately, ad revenue.

But NFTs present a means for influencers to make additional revenue on every piece of content they make (or have made) by minting their videos as digital collectibles. This is an attractive additional revenue source for any influencer. Influencers can choose whether to mint full videos or choose moments from their most popular videos, allowing fans to own pieces of their favorite unboxing videos, general explainers, product reviews, streamed gameplay, or makeup tutorials.

As influencers become increasingly aware of what they can do with NFTs, they will look to platforms to enable NFT capability. One of the advantages of VideoCoin’s NFT platform is the ease of integration into the backend of existing platforms. This allows them to maintain their branding and keep their audiences within their branded experience. We can save platforms for up to nine months of development time and resources, delivering turnkey NFT capability with a few lines of code.

Artists

In the first half of 2021, artists increased their experimentation with NFTs. Spurred by the $69 million Beeple sale, this occurred most predominantly with digital artists of static work like JPEGs and PNGs. However, other artists also got into the act. Musicians minted album covers and fashion designers minted clothing designs as NFTs.

But video unlocks a whole new realm of artistic expression. Studies have shown it to be more influential, more expressive, and responsible for driving more engagement than any other medium. Delivering video, however, is also more complex than static imagery. Video has to go through a process of encoding and transcoding in order to display on the bandwidth you have available to you or the device you are using. The VideoCoin Network was built to handle exactly these processes. As a result, we enable artists to make NFTs out of a type of media. Musicians can now make NFTs out of their music videos, live performances, or even recording sessions. Filmmakers can make NFTs of key scenes, individual takes, or alternative scenes. Visual artists, such as videographers, can even bring a fine art aesthetic to video NFTs collectibles.

IP Owners

NFT’s aren’t limited to just individual influencers and artists. Any content owner, whether it’s a person or a company can potentially benefit from NFTs.For example, production companies and studios produce thousands of hours of content every year and often own vast libraries of IP built over decades.

For them, NFTs represent an entirely new way to market and launch new content as well as monetize existing catalogs. In recent weeks, we have seen NFT announcements from traditional movie studios like Fox’s Blockchain Labs initiative and Warner Bros activation with Niftys.

There was a time when major studios derived at least half of their revenue from the home entertainment business. The business of DVDs, Blu-rays, and even digital purchases have declined since Netflix-like streaming companies changed the entire environment, but we see NFTs as an opportunity to return value to catalog and deep catalog properties. We are also interested in how IP owners can also create value in their existing library, packaging historical content as a new NFT offering.

The VideoCoin platform has a novel approach to NFTs which incorporate DRM methodologies. In a future post, we will discuss specifically how we are applying this to NFTs to enable new models around ownership and access that is completely unique to NFTs but have been the foundation for digital content for decades.

Video Games

Finally, there is probably no more organic use case than digital assets in video games. Micro-transactions and in-game purchases have created a multi-billion dollar gaming industry that could tap into NFTs and blockchain technology. Gaming is an industry driven by consumer’s passion for in-game items that have value not only as playable items but also as assets to be exchanged on secondary markets. Gamers love to collect and own unique, multifunctional items and publishers can benefit from recurring profits from license payments on NFTs. Gaming NFTs can be cosmetic, but can also have utility. There is a whole new game genre around blockchain-based games that incorporate NFTs as core mechanisms of gameplay. For example, in NFT-based games, players obtain unique NFTs as digital assets for fulfilling in-game objectives. Their rarity directly affects their price, and gamers are already familiar with the idea of valuable digital items.

NFTs in video games are here to stay and show considerable promise to change the video games sector soon. It’s also an exciting area in terms of what an NFT represents. Video Game NFTs combine aspects of collectibility, art, and utility for players. We’re on the cusp of the next leap in Gaming NFTs, soon we will be seeing AAA title games adopt NFTs.

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