The Future of Film & Media Financing via Web3 — Part 1
Part 2 • Part 3
Now that the speculative bubble around Web3 has burst for the time being, it’s a fantastic opportunity for people to look at the fundamentals of what is actually groundbreaking about the new innovations in the space — and how we’re on a multi-year journey that will result in very different landscape, particularly in the media & entertainment space.
Lessons from 2018 — Back to the Future
First, I’ll tell you why I’m overwhelmingly positive about the web3 space. Rewind to 2017/2018 — I was at Sony Pictures Entertainment pitching a variety of internal projects related to blockchain technology and NFTs. I even spoke to one of the founders of Dapper Labs and said that they should be making the most of their moment with CryptoKitties, and in light of the films being made at the time– The Emoji Movie and Angry Birds — the time seemed ripe for a film based on NFT IP that was making news headlines.
Then came the market crash, and a lot of the folks I was pitching decided that NFTs were a fad, and their time had come & gone.
Meanwhile, myself and most of the friends I’d made in the NFT community had done enough of a deep dive to see the full potential of this emerging technology space– I’d been around through Web1 and Web2 — and it was giving me the same feels as when I saw a Mosaic browser for the WWW and my eyes were opened to the potential.
Not coincidentally, Marc Andreessen, who originally developed the Mosiac browser long before he reinvented himself as a VC with a16z, also draws the same parallels between early web1 and current web3.
Buidlers gonna Buidl
In the last market crash, my friends and peers in the space who continued to maintain their enthusiasm and keep building out what they are excited about are now the ‘names’ in the space.
If Dapper hadn’t continued to try multiple web3 experiments through 2018–2019, they wouldn’t have arrived at Top Shot in 2020 — which helped usher in the next wave of growth in 2021.
Also around 2018, my friend Jimmy invited me to help advise his project Avastars — which was also responsible for a few innovations:
- Launched with a PFP use case in mind
- Complete artwork stored on-chain
- Included a license granting owners complete usage rights of their art
Today Jimmy and Dapper are familiar to everyone in this space because they continued to build through the downturn, while others sat on their ideas and waited for the market to improve (me included).
Part 2 — How the media & entertainment landscape will change
I felt like this long-winded preamble was necessary before I can get into the exciting changes that are afoot, because of negative market-driven sentiment.
Hopefully this will give you some historical precedent as ammo against the web3 naysayers.
