The streaming wars are heating up from Netflix to YouTube, Spotify, and Amazon; today everyone is streaming digital content. This year alone it is estimated that the streaming industry will generate revenues of US$12.4 BILLION. One of perhaps the biggest issues facing the industry is TRUST. There is still a lot of distrust from content creators who believe that these companies are not paying content creators fairly. The system that accounts for royalty payments is completely managed by the company, in a self-owned system that can be manipulated in favor of the streaming platform, leaving content creators distrustful of distributing content on a revenue-sharing basis.
The Problem with Online Streaming
Digital streaming has a lot of advantages for content consumers but for music artists, for example, many are faced with not being able to monetize their work on 3rd party platforms and have no means of verifying royalty payments.
The way it typically works with music streaming platforms is Artists grant permission to YouTube, for example, to stream their music in exchange for royalties that are paid based on the advertising sales and in some cases content viewership. Artists, however, are not compensated equally by music streaming giants even if they have the same number of streams. Some artists are compensated more than others depending on the music genre, geographic location and other undisclosed factors. The lack of transparency in determining how artists are compensated is a major issue that the music industry is seeking to solve.
The disparity in payments has led to a lot of criticism from artists claiming they were not being rightfully compensated for their work.
The Solution
CEEK VR has teamed up with Microsoft to offer content sales and usage tracking on the blockchain along with automatic payments of rights owners via smart contracts so that there are no human interference and discrimination on who gets paid what to stream their content.
This innovative company tracks content sales and usage on the distributed ledger blockchain built on Microsoft’s Azure Blockchain Service. Thanks to this partnership, CEEK VR enables the tokenization of smart tickets for content creators, who can easily track content viewership on the blockchain. This mechanism ensures royalty payouts to artists are based on trustworthy data, easily verifiable on an unaltered ledger.
Furthermore, content creators will also be able to tokenize merchandise and track sales in real-time through the usage of blockchain technology. Artists would finally be able to be fairly compensated for their work, increasing their revenue by offering access to authenticated merchandise, live performances and unique experiences to audiences around the world.
Microsoft is also playing a fundamental role in the adoption of blockchain technology at multiple scales. As part of their future offering of blockchain-as-a-service, the company will also provide customers with a blockchain data manager designed for enterprise-scale data integration, simplifying the management of blockchain data at large scales.
For more information on the platform visit www.ceek.com and for more information on the blockchain visit Ceek.io
