Blockchain-powered film and video rights startup launches fundraising campaign
Reducing film and video piracy by 80% within 10 years is the ambitious promise of Sydney-based startup Veredictum as it launches a fundraising campaign.
The company, which yesterday launched a sale of its ‘tokens’ that it hopes will raise at least $7.5 million, claims its blockchain technology will let rights owners track the usage of their works and will eventually provide a payments platform for consumers.
“Piracy is not just one person’s problem; it’s everyone’s,” saidVeredictum’s founder Tim Lea. “Our objective is to galvanise the creative community together to solve the biggest problem that is facing the community’s very survival.
“If you know what you are doing, it is easy to take video from one social media platform to another. This places content producers at risk. Once a video has been viewed once it is very rare someone will watch it a second time. Lost eyeballs mean lost revenue.”
The company’s technology creates a distributed network of users that performs decentralised global searches for registered content and enables enhanced video distribution services. Participants in return receive payment in the startup’s cryptocurrency, Ventana.
“Whilst there is a natural incentive for creatives to want to resolve the problem of piracy and theft, from a pragmatic point of view we also need to economically incentivise the community to work with us. This could not be achieved using traditional financial systems,” said Lea. “By using our cryptocurrency, Ventana, our community can earn Ventana while they sleep.”
Lea expects Ventana will able to be converted to Bitcoin within a couple of weeks of the Token Sale completing.
“We are talking with a number of the cryptocurrency exchanges to accept Ventana. Once on the exchanges, Ventana will be able to be exchanged for Bitcoin and then ultimately exchanged for local currencies,” Lea said. “In this way, our community can either hold their Ventana, sell it for their local currency or use the currency to buy additional services currently being designed for the platform.”
Veredictum’s long-term plan is to give consumers easier access to content by connecting content producers directly to market influencers and their “tribes” in a marketplace where customers collectively bid for the content they wish to view.
“Content producers will have a new wholesale channel that is market defined and performance oriented. Piracy so often happens because content is not readily available. So many people have told us they would willingly pay for content if they had easy access at prices that were fair.”
