You Should Get Paid to Watch TV
(or Watch Movies, or Play Games, or Listen to Music)
Movie Poster Collage by ConTully on Reddit
You Don’t Own Anything, Especially Content.
You rent your house or apartment, you rent your cars or use ride-sharing, phone companies let you rent your phone or pay it off over time, credit companies have you over a barrel buying things with money you don’t have, you rent your music from Spotify, you rent your movies and TV from Netflix, and you are starting to rent games again. You don’t own your photos, Facebook does. You don’t own your video, YouTube does. You don’t own your digital storage or hard drives, Dropbox / Apple / Google does. You are perfectly happy giving everything you have to big companies, receiving nothing material in exchange other than ephemeral service, and actually paying for that privilege. The sad thing is, we used to own our content. We had record collections, a wall of DVDs and CDs, we could trade with our friends or let them borrow. There were beautiful album covers and artwork we could hold in our hands, and the tactile sensation of holding the work of our favorite artist.
But alas, ownership is dead, and access to just about everything you want has one thing in the way: A middleman.
Middlemen Increase Costs and Hurt Creators
The alarming rise of digital middlemen has been disastrous for creators, artists, and studios, and it increases prices for consumers.
Source: Digital Music News
Steam and iTunes take 30% of the revenue into a black box of profit, while YouTube is even more greedy taking 45% of creator revenue.
Facebook Snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram give you nothing. And not only that, they also take your personal information and sell it to advertisers taking 100% of the revenue! They can also ban and censor you at will, and they’re doing this on a regular basis. (“You’re Welcome” for the free social network though!).
Epic is starting to get it right but they’re still in the middle of you and your content, and they control your library with the ability to take anything away from you at any time. They also hold all of your credit card and personal information, which can be packaged up and sold against your will.
Video and Aggregators are Getting Abusive
Now, if you want to stream video on your TV now, you need a service like Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, HBOMax, Peacock TV, Pluto, Sling, Fubo, and more. Or, shudder, cable… Many of these companies are focused on using exclusive content only available on their service, to win against their competitors (along with lots of cringe marketing). This is BAD for consumers, and also bad for the many larger independent studios who were banking on premium aggregators to build a business. Netflix and YouTube used to be great options for both consumers and creators because they were aggregators of content and created business opportunities for studios and creators. Those days are over.
If aggregators stay mostly out of the way and don’t abuse their position, it‘s a powerful way to gain reach for creators and a very consumer-friendly experience. Inevitably though, aggregators either start to abuse their power (squeezing revenue shares, changing algorithms, requiring ad buys for reach), or they start competing directly with the creators with original content/product, or both. YouTube recently found some of this backlash in full swing on Twitter with the trend #YouTubeIsOver, and Facebook’s faking of video views is destroying companies who “Pivoted to Video.”
Censorship, Demonetization, and Changing Algorithms
On a whim, any one of the above aggregators, particularly the ones dealing in User Generated Content, can remove your content with no explanation and wipe out an entire revenue stream. YouTube recently demonetized The Great War Channel because they thought the content was deemed too sensitive, and similarly they demonetized a history teacher’s content because he was teaching about the history of Nazi’s. Now, there is plenty of trash content that needs to be managed or regulated on platforms, but the problem is that genuine creators building a business get caught up in the fray. It’s incredibly difficult to manage at scale, and generally, the appeals to the platforms in these situations fall on deaf ears.
Maybe all this explains why BitTorrent is on the rise again. According to Sandvine’s Global Internet Phenomena report, BitTorrent traffic accounts for 22% of all internet traffic, and in Europe, Middle East, and Africa, BitTorrent is over 31% of upstream traffic. That is a staggering amount of content moving around the internet that, should a good solution present itself, could be re-positioned in the right mix of true ownership with a commercial context.
Advertising Actually Costs You Something
Some crude back of the napkin math: The average TV viewer spends about an hour of time each day watching ads. That’s 365 hours a year. Broken down into what your time is worth, that’s 365/8 = 45.62 work days, or about 2 months of work time if you work 20 days in a 4 week month.
So, what’s your salary for 2 months? That’s how much ‘free TV” is costing you.
You’re paying with your time, but also paying with your information that’s being sold to the highest bidder. That’s right: Your information is being sold, and you aren’t getting a cut… Those 365 hours of wasted time a year are abusive to your personal information, and in the end, all the money made off of selling your data went to everyone except you. That includes the 200 middlemen getting their cut of the advertising pie and tracking you. Maybe you should be getting paid too?
P2P Networks Don’t Reward Users
There are various high profile uses of P2P networks that didn’t work, worked for the wrong reasons, or work in a private context to the benefit of the company not the individual.
If you’re a Windows 10 User, you might be using your storage and bandwidth to help Microsoft deliver updates, with no benefit to you.
Spotify used a P2P network to deliver music around the globe, and you had no idea they were using your devices. Granted, they no longer practice this, but you save them a ton of money and saw none of it.
Napster, Limewire, etc all were very pure file sharing applications that, while enabling you to get content for free, didn’t incentivize you to participate in the network and weren’t legitimate for most use cases surrounding content. They were absolutely transformational, and that can’t be discounted, but it wasn’t the best experience for consumers or creators. You had lots of leeching and the massive crackdown by the RIAA, MPAA, and ISPs tracking your every move around piracy.
So What IS the Solution?
The Consumer-Creator Content Utopia
Ideally, when you pay for content, you should own it and control your copy. You should have it on every device, and no company should control your access to it.
You shouldn’t have to sell your personal information to advertisers, and no company should control (and lose control) of your payment information.
If the company you purchased something from goes away or changes direction, that should never change the fact that you bought that content and own it forever. (Ever buy an album or movie multiple times in different formats or on different services? Frustrating?)
You should be able to find this content through aggregators, but once you’ve paid for the content, it’s yours no matter which aggregator you find it on again.
Creators should have transparency on what the revenue share is, and they should have a more direct relationship with the fans resulting in getting paid more.
Consumers should be rewarded for being fans and engaging in a network, instead of value constantly being extracted from them and personal data being sold with no return.
The underlying system should be censor-proof. If businesses build on top of the platform, they can manage their community effectively, but once a purchase is made on any platform, it can’t be taken away from you for any reason.
This should be built using blockchain and distributed technologies where possible.
This is a service that is good for consumers AND creators. It’s a direct relationship that’s more valuable to everyone, and the only thing that’s standing in its way today is greed.
So How Do You Get Paid to Watch TV?
I hope the industry will adopt the above principles into their own businesses, but in the meantime, we designed a system that follows the paradigm above which we’ll be rolling out throughout 2020. Check it out here at Littlstar, and if you’re a super geek and want to read all about the technology behind this, read the whitepaper and check out Ara.
Share / clap / and comment. Id love to hear from you! Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and Medium here: Littlstar. If you’re a creator or media company and like what you’re hearing, email partnerships@littlstar.com. If you’re a fan of great content like ESports, Comedy, Drama, Sports, Music, Reality, and more, go get Littlstar on PS4 (and all devices coming soon) and take the journey!
Baby Yoda thanks you for your time. To the future!
