Monetizing Open Video Assets

(helping creators get paid)

We know how successful digital subscriptions are – at time of writing, Netflix has 209 million subscribers; Spotify 165 million; Disney+ has 116 million; even Mubi has 10 million. Web Monetization offers a different model for online subscriptions that’s not tied to a single website. If the current subscription giants are like Holywood Studios or the Big Three music majors; Web Monetization (WM) is more like indie film and music; and it could support a diverse, global ecosystem of creators.

Monetizing Open Video Assets or mova, is a project to support filmmakers, archives and video distributors in benefiting from the new technology and revenue source of Web Monetization (WM). We hope to add to the growing WM ecosystem two developments:

Cascade, a payout system for more complex and precise revenue sharing of WM income;
MOVA, a distributed registry of rights and payment data connected to video files using another new technology, the International Standard Content Code (ISCC) and Holochain.

MOVA is kindly supported by Grant for the Web.

Cascade

Precise revenue sharing for Web Monetization income

A CiviCRM extension will distribute income received at a wallet address according to user-defined, multi-stage rules, as a penny/cent-accurate alternative to Web Monetization’s probabilistic revenue sharing. Built on CiviCRM allows integration with the big three CMS (WordPress, Joomla & Drupal), and integrated reporting and tracking, but we’re developing the agreeement builder around a Javascript app and open Revenue Sharing Language.

MOVA

A desktop app to pair videos with a wallet and other metadata

The ISCC is an open framework to deliver a reliable ‘soft fingerprint’ or universal identifier from any media. Our mova desktop app (for Mac, Linux and hopefully Windows) will generate an ISCC from a video, and then associate it with a payment pointer or Interledger wallet address and other metadata, then register this on a shared public ledger, using the Holochain system.

Who is involved

Mark Boas

Italy

Is behind the Grant for the Web Project Hyperaudio for Conferences and has worked with media companies such as Al Jazeera, BBC, CBC, Danish Radio. He was a Knight-Mozilla OpenNews fellow in 2012, and subsequently won a grant from the Knight Foundation to co-found Hyperaud.io and later went on to co-found Trint Ltd.

maboa.it

Titusz Pan

Germany

Titusz Pan is an entrepreneur and open-source developer. He is the inventor and architect of the International Standard Content Code. As co-founder and CEO of Craft AG, he has been developing media technology projects and incubations since the year 2000.

linkedin.com/in/titusz/

Sebastian Posth

The Netherlands

Is an entrepreneur in the digital media industries, consultant on digital innovation and blockchain applications, co-founder and director of the ISCC Foundation, academic researcher on DIDs and blockchain governance, and expert in (various) ISO working groups.

posth.me

Silvia Schmidt

UK / Germany

Is a film finance and media lawyer, as well as an award-winning filmmaker.

silviaschmidtlaw.com

Connor Turland

Canada

Is co-founder of Sprillow – a Canadian design and development studio for distributed systems software applications. He has over 10 years experience developing, maintaining and supporting Open Source projects including metamaps.cc, Hylo, secure scuttlebutt, the Rapid Sensemaking Framework, Holochain, and a leading Holochain application “Acorn”.

sprillow.com

Pegah Vaezi

Canada

Co-founder of Sprillow and a transdisciplinary designer. Her Masters thesis, “What do we mean when we say content moderation: Digital Censorship, Surveillance and Creative Workers” explored ramifications of content moderation online, and won best symposium of the year by NOW magazine in 2019.

sprillow.com

Matthew Wire

Portugal / UK

A former BBC systems engineer and founder of MJW Consulting, a leading CiviCRM partner. He’s developer and maintainer of Stripe Payment Processor, used on nearly 20% of CiviCRM sites worldwide.

mjwconsult.co.uk

Nicol Wisterich

UK / Norway

Co-founded Netribution in 1999, wrote Digital Asset Management for Informa and co-wrote the Film Finance Handbook. Is also a front-end designer active in the CiviCRM community, and designed and built & maintains a cross-CMS theme for it.

visuali.st

The technologies we’re using

Web Monetization

Web Monetization is a subscription system for the worldwide web. It’s not tied to any one company or system, although at the moment there’s just one provider, Coil.

Learn More

CiviCRM

The non-profit open source Contact Relationship Manager for non-profits, NGOs, arts orgs and the civic sector – used by over 11,000 organisations from the Royal Television Society to Wikipedia.

Learn More

International Standard Content Code

ISCC is an open source algorythm which generate an ID from a media file. Unlike ISBN, DOI or other media identifiers – it is always generatable from the file, furthermore, it is still resolvable after chaning the file format, file name, size, colour or resolution.

Learn More

Holochain

Holochain is a new decentralised database, or distributed ledger technology whose architecture is many orders of magnitude less energy intensive than blockchains (either proof-of-work or proof-of-stake).

Learn More