“All the museums in the world pay bogus lip service to so-called ‘world art’.” Anish Kapoor, the renowned sculptor, discusses tokenism in the arts, with @AnneMcElvoy on “The Economist Asks” podcast https://t.co/My514jq8Ep
— The Economist (@TheEconomist) December 19, 2021
The amount of digital media in the world is growing exponentially on a daily basis. Increasingly mobile digital nomads are churning out zillions of pictures and videos. The stock photography market, estimated at about $3 Billion in 2018, is looking for new ways to cope with sheer amount of unruly digital content, to search and classify images and video, to manage digital rights and make a profit in increasingly crowded and diluted marketplace. Here comes the blockchain technology.
NFTs are all the rage and hype now. The mere adding of the word “blockchain” to company name moves up stock prices of otherwise unremarkable and boring businesses. No wonder that blockchain technology is increasingly touted a silver bullet for all problems of the entire digital media distribution food chain. The interest to combining blockchain and media distribution is huge, no day passes without some venture capital firm asking us whether to invest in blockchain media market. Among companies already jumping into the blockchain media distribution game are Kodak, Wenn Digital, Ascribe.io, Binded, Decent, IPStock, theMaven Network, Po.et, Staramba, Play2Live, Viuly.io and others.
Most of existing media distribution platforms, stock photography among them, are based on copying and downloading digital content. The blockchain-powered media platforms are different, they transfer not only data but also ownership through distributed consensus ledger. Definitely blockchain technology opens new possibilities in digital content distribution:
accountability along the distribution chain,
new disruptive models of distribution, P2B without middleman, for example,
vastly improved and more flexible digital rights management (DRM).
Yet many questions still remain open:
Does blockchain pack enough punch to disrupt existing stock photography market long suffering from oversupply and declining profit margins?
For which segments of media market blockchain will work? For which does not?
Is this Uber/Airbnb scale disruption or just minor improvement?
Timing? Is technology mature?
Power balance in the market, is it favorable for change?
Will big players like Adobe, Getty Images and Shutterstock adopt blockchain?
Is this worth it?
Blockchain talent pool is limited and highly sought. How will it affect blockchain adoption in media distribution markets?
The report analyses possible market scenarios and quantifies market impact of blockchain technology on media distribution.
