The film industry is one of the largest industries worldwide and just seems to continue to grow. Last year alone the USA film industry generated $11,123,606,308 at the box office, a figure that shows how solid the market is.
Another indisputable fact is that the film industry has been battling the piracy phenomenon since the popularization of the digital age. Hollywood is therefore urgently looking for a solution and as you may already suspect, a potential candidate now comes to the fore. Let’s take a look at how blockchain technologies can improve this situation.
TaTaTu - Hollywood's approach to tackling media piracy
Andrea Lervolino is a co-founder of a blockchain-based project that seeks to stop and reduce losses from media piracy.
Before explaining how the project works in a blog post on Medium, he goes on to say that the current entertainment market is causing consumers to consume their media illegally. He refers to the methods the film industry uses to send more people to the cinema in a “guaranteed” way.
Apparently, this happens because the time from which a movie is available on DVD is pushed out as long as possible so that people go to the movies. The problem is that this too rarely prevents the movie from being available on online sites. His solution? A platform that adapts to the market and its needs. He said: TaTaTu will provide “free access to content” while “rewarding users with an automatic monetization system”.
In this way, right-holders can be relaxed, as they are able to generate revenue based on the actual consumption of users and the whole system is based on a transparent and trusted system such as blockchain. Also, the reward system works with the Ethereum-based ERC-20 protocol, and those who want to upload content to the platform need to buy those tokens.
Nice idea, but...
While the project is undoubtedly ambitious, it lacks credibility. On the one hand, the platform currently only has 250 hours of available content, a tiny part of what the competitors of Amazon and Netflix offer. Furthermore, the platform will probably use advertisements to sustain itself financially, which will definitely be one of the biggest reasons why there will be users who do not want to use this platform. Ultimately, people tend to use a habitual method instead of changing. Therefore, users are more likely to continue (illegal) content downloads despite the efforts of such projects.
In conclusion, even if the TaTaTu project (or another similar project) works with other projects to reduce the scale of the problem, there are still many other factors left unresolved.
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