A Virtual Reality Cryptocurrency

Let me begin this article by briefly explaining what the Spectiv project is:

Spectiv is a Cryptocurrency project aiming to build a platform specifically for the purpose of Virtual Reality (VR) videos. Think ‘Youtube but VR instead of regular videos with a Cryptocurrency element’
That’s the brief breakdown of the project. I’ll go into more detail in a minute but first I’m going to give a bit of background information and describe what Virtual Reality is for those who don’t know.

Virtual Reality Explained

The easiest way to explain what virtual reality is; is for you to check out the video above. I’m guessing that most of you have probably seen VR headsets before; after all, you’re reading this on a Cryptocurrency website so you’re probably a bit of a tech nerd like me ;)But, for those of you who don’t know, VR headsets essentially show you an image or a video in an immersive manner. By that, I mean that the video/image fills your entire vision and also moves as your spin your head, just like regular vision.If you haven’t tried on a headset before, I can’t recommend it highly enough. I had seen plenty of people trying them on before and I always thought the same thing; ‘surely it’s just watching a video that encompasses your whole vision but it’s can’t be truly immersive’.When I tried VR for the first time, it freaked me out!I was walking through a graduate job fair at my uni (what a waste of time now hey!) and one company’s stand allowed people to try on their VR headset briefly.With my experience, the video showed me parachuting to the ground. The feeling was so real that I began losing my balance in real life! That was only the video element too, without headphones to include sound immersion also.So why am I telling you all this rather boring story?

My point is this; you wouldn’t believe how immersive Virtual Reality is unless you’ve tried a proper headset on. It truly feels like you’re in the video.With this in mind, imagine all of the incredible experiences that you could watch through a VR headset.You could go diving with sharks, you could see the view from the top of the Burj Khalifa, the possibilities are literally endless.One usage which really captures my attention is watching sports through a VR headset. I’m a huge fan of the majority of sports; football, rugby, tennis, formula 1 and more.If a company were to place a VR camera inside Old Trafford (here come the haters!) and I could watch Man United every week in a truly immersive experience as if I was watching them in real life, it would be absolutely incredible!Even better, what if they put 5 or 6 different cameras in different positions within the stadium and you could switch between various angles during the match? It would be incredible.It wouldn’t even be too hard; essentially, it’s the same thing that currently happens at a football match, you just have to replace the regular cameras with VR cameras and stream the content to people at home.Obviously, this would require some technological upgrades from the current system (improved internet to stream such detail) but this is only a matter of time.Hopefully, I’ve got you guys as excited by Virtual Reality as I am myself and now we can move on Spectiv’s concept.

Spectiv’s Concept

The core premise of Spectiv’s ideology is this:Advertisers should be paying viewers directly to watch their contentAnd you have to admit, the idea is kind of genius.Let me put it into context to explain it better; currently, advertisers pay content creation platforms, e.g. Youtube, in order to put adverts on their site.The purpose of this is so that viewers i.e. you and me see their advert and potentially buy their product or service.In other words, regular people create content (videos) which they put on Youtube for people like you and me to see. Youtube hosts the videos for ‘free’ but essentially charge us by making us sit through adverts.This is where the power of Cryptocurrencies and decentralisation comes in… Spectiv are proposing that publishers, viewers and curators should all be paid directly by the advertisers.The traditional model employed by Youtube is to take a 45% cut for themselves and distribute the rest between their expenses and the video publisher.However, due to the vastly improved efficiency of the Spectiv platform, it isn't necessary to charge such high fees, instead they will take a cut of 10-15% from advertising and the remaining 85-90% will go towards content publishers, viewers and curators.Advertisers are trying to get viewers to watch their adverts so it actually makes sense that the viewers should be getting paid.Until recently though, this has never been possible. This is just one of the many reasons that I love Cryptocurrencies and, more importantly, the blockchain technology behind it!So, we’ve already covered how incredible Virtual Reality is and the core concept of Spectiv, now let’s move on to a few more specific details.

Spectiv’s 4 Main Players

In their whitepaper, Spectiv discuss the existence of 4 characters in content creation and distribution:

Publishers - The people who make the content
Viewers - The people who watch the content
Curators - The people who share the content (social media etc.)
Advertisers - The people who have use the popularity of the content to advertise their own products/services. They pay a price for advertising.

Ad Campaign Smart Contracts

Advertisers create an ‘ad campaign smart contract’ (ACSC)
This is a contract which automatically pays publishers, viewers and curators in Sigs (the native currency of the platform) for their role in making, watching and sharing videos
Publishers can browse through various advertising campaigns (in the form of ACSC)
When they find one which matches up well for their content, they ‘engage with the smart contract on the Spectiv platform’ - the details aren’t given in the whitepaper but I assume it will be user-friendly in order to encourage usage
Once a publisher has done this, he/she automatically gets paid for the views they get and the length of time that viewers watch their content
Essentially, this promotes good content as these videos will be watched by viewers for longer and thus earn more advertising revenue
Viewers are also automatically paid just for watching the content and sitting through an advert or 2; the same thing we already do on Youtube for zero pay!

The content curator role is slightly more complicated so I will explain it separately below:

Content Curators i.e. people who aggregate the content of others and share it via social media etc. will pay to a video they would like to share.
This generates a unique link via which they can share the content
When viewers watch via the shared video, the curators receive a share of the payment

In their whitepaper, it becomes clear that Spectiv believe that the content curators play a huge role in the content viewing and distribution process.I recognise an element of truth in this but I wouldn’t say it is quite to the extent that they claim in my experience at least; when I want to watch a video, I head straight to Youtube and watch it directly from the content publisher, not via a social media link.Through their plan, Spectiv are essentially creating another marketplace for content curators; if you believe that you can build a following by sharing other people’s content then you can also take a piece of the payment.I believe this can be both a positive and negative for the platform; the positive being that individuals who already have a following on various social media sites will be incentivised to share content from the Spectiv platform and this will drive more traffic. They could even earn a decent living this way if the platform takes off.The negative, however, is that it could discourage regular people from sharing content because they will have to pay to do so and they will most likely not make their money back, unless they have lots of followers

What Kind Of Content Will Viewers See?

There are 2 main categories of VR content:

Community Content
Commercial Events

1. Community Content

This is content shared by community members for other viewers to watch.In the whitepaper, Spectiv list a few examples and, I have to admit, the idea is pretty cool.Let’s say a community members lives in New York. His daily schedule might involve walking some of the sights that many people around the world regularly travel thousands of miles to see.By carrying a VR camera round with him through the sights, all other community members can view an immersive experience of some of these incredible sights.On the other side of the world, other users may live relatively near to the Taj Mahal and can easily travel there. They can easily share that experience for all community members.Another example could be people who are brave enough to jump into a shark cage and see great whites up close. Suddenly, you, as a viewer can watch this in an immersive manner as if you’re experiencing this yourselfThe content publishers in these scenarios have actually done little work (as the locations are near to where the live anyway) and yet can share the content for payment, allowing viewers all over the world to see incredible sights and experiences in a truly immersive manner.Spectiv highlight that this method is the main purpose of the platform

Commercial Events

I’ve already touched on this earlier in the article when I described how much I would love to watch Man U as if I’m in the stadium myself. Therefore, I won’t go into too much more detail here. I’ll just add 2 more important points:

Commercial events can include any kind of event you can imagine ranging from sports events to live music performances
Commercial events can charge a fee in Sigs for users to view the content

The Challenges

So far, I’ve been extremely positive about the prospect of Virtual Reality; it’s an expanding market and it’s not hard to see why when it can provide such a remarkable user experience.I also love the idea of sharing VR content with a community so that everyone on the platform can be immersed in the same experiences as other users. On top of this, advertisers directly paying the viewers for their time is a pretty unique and amazing concept.However, we haven’t addressed the main issue Spectiv will have when creating their platform; gaining a critical number of users.Put simply, if Spectiv aren’t able to gain enough users, the platform won't be a success; advertisers won’t pay when viewership figures are low and thus all of the unique aspects of the Spectiv platform simply won't succeed.Spectiv also recognise that they will face a large number of competitors in the market e.g. Netflix VR, Youtube VR, HBO VR, Google's Daydream and more. These existing companies will also be able to drive viewing figures from their existing audience base and thus have a headstart on Spectiv.This, for me, is the most significant difficulty potentially stopping the platform from being a commercial success. Spectiv have listed a number of differentiation strategies that they hope will allow them to overcome these issues, however, so let's take a look at these now:

1. 'SIG Sale Awareness'

By selling SIGs in a token sale (ICO), the Spectiv team hopes this will generate buzz around the platform and result in increased usage.The issue here could be that many people buying Sigs are simply investors/speculators and have no plans to use their platform for themselves. Further, as the platform won't be ready for some time after the token sale, the hype surrounding it will most likely have calmed down.

2. VR Headset Giveaway

In order to encourage new users to sign up, Spectiv will be holding a campaign which will involve crediting $3 in SIGs and sending a free phone-compatible cardboard VR headset to a limited number of users.I believe this to be a good strategy. Not only will this encourage people to spend the SIGs that they receive, Spectiv are also attempting to overcome the biggest challenge they face; currently, so few people are able to test Virtual Reality as they don't have the headsets necessary. Obviously, the cardboard version won't really cut it for users but it should hopefully show them an exciting prospect, leading to them purchasing the real VR headsets.

3. Viewers Are Paid

I've already covered this in more detail earlier in the article but it would be amiss to not mention it again in this category. Currently, viewers can watch content on Youtube for free but, on the Spectiv platform, they will actually get paid to do so.Clearly, there will be an incentive for viewers to use the platform - depending on how much they get paid. If there are viewers on the platform, it should drive content creators to post which will driver a greater number of viewers and the cycle continues.This is a pretty big selling point of the platform for me but it all comes down to the amount of money that viewers can gain by watching videos.

Token Sale Details

The token sale will take place on December 8th - 2pm GMT
The token price will not be given until, however, this doesn't matter because only market cap does
The maximum cap will be at $40 million
Further details have yet to be released
The best place to track further updates is their website: www.spectivvr.com

Roadmap

Below, you can see the roadmap given by Spectiv. The 2 most important dates to take note of are the beta platform release in 2018 Q2 and the full platform release in 2018 Q3

Team

The team appear to be very competent; many of them are young yet they have already achieved impressive feats in their relatively few years. For me, this is a great sign as it shows that the team are hungry and have chosen to undertake this project as they truly believe it; not just for a paycheck.

Token Sale Proceeds

Other Points To Mention

In the Spectiv whitepaper, they discuss how the native tokens (Sigs) can be used on any platform and thus future platforms can also integrate with them, thus driving the demand for the tokens much higher.For me, I think this is cool to have as an option but is somewhat of a novel feature and I can't honestly imagine many other platforms wishing to do so, unless Spectiv were able to offer them an incentive for doing so

Conclusion

Ultimately, gaining users is the most significant challenge faced by the team and it will determine the success of the platform.
I don't offer financial advice on this channel; I simply attempt to simplify and explain projects to investors.
In this case, I would say the following; if you believe Spectiv can gain enough users with the strategies mentioned above, then they could be a great investment.
If you don't believe they can achieve this, there might be better investment options out there for you.

Spectiv Website - https://www.spectivvr.com/
Spectiv Whitepaper - https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7Ka-hlyeNJhR1lkWjZmNjctQ0k/view