Here’s my short take on a piece of media technology. This week I look at an immature maturing technology, blockchain. Do you agree? [blog.mindrocketnow.com]
As I’m sure you know, a blockchain is a way of recording information in a way that is (almost) impossible to cheat. It’s trivial to check, no one body (like a bank) guarantees any chain, so it’s eminently suited to industries that suffer from multiple intermediaries and opaque authorities, like finance. Or broadcast?
Blockchain is unparalleled in establishing trust across domains of ownership. Broadcast is all about passing assets across domains of ownership. If each media asset was accompanied by an immutable history, we’d know who contributed, how much, and therefore where royalties should be shared. We could see a technical history of all the corrections and transcoding over the workflow, and maybe change TV settings to compensate.
But it strikes me that blockchain isn’t the answer, because broadcast has already optimised the secured distribution of content. I don’t mean that content security is perfect because it’s far from. It’s optimised because the leakage of revenue isn’t significant enough to merit ripping out and replacing all the technology, legal and consumer investments that we’ve made.
So for broadcast, and for the time being, blockchain is still a solution looking for a problem.
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