 This is the fourth installment in the Evolution of Content series presented by Solis and Cointelegraph. This series of panels explores how content creation, distribution, and engagement are evolving, featuring a curated selection of producers, actors, directors, artists, creators, and founders with traditional and Web3 experience. Today's panel explores how Web3 will transform the ways content is distributed to audiences, featuring Andrea Barry of Theta TV, Josh Aten of Ronan, Stephen Murray of Bingeable, and Mihai Krasnianu of Beam, hosted by Cointelegraph's Anastasia Dreneskaya and Brett Claywell of Solis. This is the future of Web3 content distribution. Welcome. I am Brett Claywell from Solis and joined by Anastasia Dreneskaya from Cointelegraph. We're producing a series on the intersection of traditional and Web3 media. I'm looking forward and we have a panel for you today on what is the future of content distribution. So I'm joined here on Zoom by our friend Mihai Krasnianu from Beam. I have Josh Aten from Ronan, Andrea Barry from Theta, and Stephen Murray from Bingeable. So maybe I'll let you get into the first questions. Yeah, let's start. Web2 brings value through data and Web3 brings value through cryptocurrency. How will this impact content distribution, actually? Well, I like to say with some of these broader questions, it's like, I don't, we don't know, we don't know yet, which is exciting. I think we're all in these industries and thematically we're tied together, although different companies, because we're creating new paths forward in this space. Simply to answer your question, it would be that tokenomics allow for businesses, content owners, the creators to drive incentivized behavior that they want to see, right? And there's all of these earned to watch, to play models that are possible with this. So that would be like my most literal simple answer, although it's very difficult to stop there. The terms are overriding the technology or the opportunity, right? So it's more about, you know, speaking to what you just said, Web2 was about data, but what is Web3 about more broadly in distribution, maybe? I actually embrace Web3 not because of the technology, not because of some sort of format. I embrace Web3 because of its moral construct. It is about shifting the balance of power. It says that the creators in the community they build are more powerful than the pipes that deliver their work. And the entertainment industry is structured exactly the opposite, where the value is in the ability to market and distribute, thus undervaluing the ability to create as it relates to the technology that underlies it. We'll see what that turns into. You know, an NFT that is connected to a movie. I don't think that's called an NFT. I think that's called a movie, because the consumer doesn't have any idea or care what the format is. We need to maybe stop naming the technology as the thing and name the thing the thing. Josh, a lot of companies over the past decade have shifted to digital, but you're still focused on television in a lot of ways, right? How is Web3 going to affect the television experience versus maybe what a lot of people are focusing on on digital? Yeah, I mean, I think the way that we see the landscape, we launched Altered TV and we're launching a couple of those CTV networks is I think it's going to take a long time to shift the actual content consumption behaviors, right? It's very difficult to shape or shift consumer consumption habits, whether it's television or shopping experiences. You can make them better or easier, but do a full paradigm shift where I'm now all of a sudden changing how I view things or watch things or consume them. All that being said, I think what I love about Web3 and both what you guys are saying I think is a heavy influence on it is the utility around it. I think what does Web3 enable both from maybe philosophical of the philosophy of more control from the content creator and a deeper and more direct connection to the consumer? At the same time, we have to make sure that we're making it easy to onboard and not actually forcing a change of consumption on the content side but augmenting it. It's like choice. We're giving them more choices. We're giving them more opportunities to have to kind of curate their own experiences. Mihai, to pull you into the conversation, I think a lot of what we've seen pioneered is in that space. So if we're looking at traditional live streaming and traditional live streamers or content creators in that space who have already been successful, what would be your argument to why Web3 is going to be a better opportunity for them based on what we already see and the success they may already be enjoying? Everybody is fighting for the last 20, 30, 40 years for people to pay for content. That's the main problem of every streamer. And they were juggling with all the distribution models because at the end of the day, we realize and after 20, 25 years spent in streaming, you know, you know that well, nobody really likes to pay for content, right? People want to pay for to support a creator, but they especially want to pay for an experience and a form of utility. But mostly, they want to pay for belonging to a group, to belonging to a certain subset of fans, right? They want to experience something. As humans, we live experiences essentially. When you talk about streamers, we all know that you need big numbers because nobody pays too much. Nobody wants to pay too much. It's a fight for price. And at the end of the day, the creators don't get much of that share. So you really need to reach billions of people to make some money. In the world of Web 3, we need thousands of people who are really passionate and love the experience. And because they love the experience, they're happy to pay from their pocket 10 times more, 100 times more than, you know, being, you know, fed a stream of content. Look at music, look at art, look at anything. You know, people are, you know, the fans crave to give their money, but please, give me an experience. Give me authenticity. And I think that's what Web 3 brings to the entire paradigm shift in entertainment and distribution in general. We are always back and forth to the community question, like how community changes with time and with technologies. And I do have a question to you, Josh, in terms of television. I think it's very, I'm very curious how you are fighting with the streamers for audience, for the community, because it's obvious for everyone that television lost at some point, the community, what, because back to the years, television was the only one resource after the radio to, to heaven use. And now we have so many media, and in terms of what media means, we have so much inside. So how does experience change the television in your point of view? Yeah, what's interesting, I mean, even what is television anymore versus what is film, right? So the reality is, at the end of the day, we have a place where we go to consume content. And right now, about 95% of that, especially in a post COVID world, is a TV that's on your wall. But you bring up a great point, which is also how do you acquire audiences when you have a massive fight for those eyeballs, whether it's Hulu or Netflix, or all the Disney Plus, all these places. And so number one, I think it's difficult, but you have to have, you have to deliver something unique, you have to have a unique audience, you have to have a unique point of view. And I think that's what's exciting. Again, one of the reasons we're excited about Web 3 is it's going to have basic utilities that's going to allow us to empower smaller communities to be more involved and engaged. One of the sort of secret sauces of TV versus even social media is that either through a revenue standpoint or through a sort of power standpoint, 150,000 people watching an hour of content in a TV environment is worth a million people or two million people or three million people watching maybe even a TikTok or an Instagram reel, whatever it is. So the power dynamics aren't the same. So you're going to get a more engaged, longer audience, and there's more ways to monetize that. I think that's going to be the last thing to shift. But I think, again, the best thing to do now is how do we incentivize these clusters of audiences in the groups of tens of thousands, 100 to thousands, and who are watching specific things and get them into the fold of Web 3 by using utility incentivization, tokenization, all these other things. I think too often Web 3 is focused on disruption right now. And I don't think that's what the focus should be on. Personally, I think it's about being additive. But what probably most excited about in terms of the monetization and distribution is the musicians have always had the ability to go directly to their fans, right? Ludacris went gold out of his trunk, right? That's the ability to engage in us as content creators. We've never had that ability till now, maybe. So how knowing that the infrastructure is going to be very slow to change, how is Web 3, what can we take from what music has taught us to slowly advance this direct to consumer opportunity we have? I started a little record company out of my literally built a recording studio in my backyard and started a record company, a little indie rock label in Nashville, Tennessee, back in the day. And the way we marketed all of our bands was we used street team marketing. And the idea was relatively simple. We would go to college campuses and certain markets and we would find kids that we thought were really into music and we'd give them a baseball hat that had our record company logo on it and say, yeah, you live in Sheboygan, but you're now in the record business. And you can tell all your friends that you're in the record business. And you can say, hey, my band's coming in and playing this weekend. And if you get enough people to come to the show, you're going to get backstage and the band will thank you for all of your work. That was catnip for a fan. It was like, this is the coolest thing that they could do. And when I started seeing this shift where the ability to distribute was becoming less and less the purview of the entertainment industry. In other words, when it shifted from terrestrial distribution to digital discovery and consumption, that was an opportunity to take that model of street team marketing and bring it into the digital realm. So starting in 2007, I created a company called Amplifier. And the idea was that if you speak to your community the right way, if you empower them, if you align their interests, they will go do so much marketing for you that you can reduce your traditional marketing spend. And now we're bringing that into the Web 3 world. So this is something Mihai and I talk about quite often. And even Andrea and I have talked about it is, is Web 3 right now the origination or the destination? Meaning that is this where projects can be created, but maybe not necessarily where we are expecting the community to come to consume that. It's not the destination. It's the origination of these projects, setting them up in such a way where the creators are in control. They own their own IP and they have built a community of people where the new logo hat is an NFT that identifies you as part of that community, as part of that team, and it aligns your interests to go and actively amplify that project to people who know nothing about NFTs, who know nothing about crypto, who know nothing about Web 3 and maybe are even scared of it. But they have the ability to go and reach those audiences. The best way to convert an audience is to not have to find them first, but simply to just engage them and give them something that they already want and an easy way to get it. Entertainment is the greatest gateway drug to getting consumers to adopt new technology that's ever existed. The revolution of Web 3 will be led by entertainment and by creators 100%. But right now, there's an old rule in business. If you want somebody to adopt new technology, it better make something they already do easier, not harder. And right now, we're asking them to buy the limited edition Blu-ray of a movie that you've never seen that hasn't come out yet. And oh, by the way, you have to jump through a lot of hoops. And by the way, you can't use money. It's really complicated. It's confusing. If we fix that, then we can shift from Web 3 being the origination to the destination. I think there's two things, too. I think we started, the challenges right now are twofold. So number one, I'll go back to how I found out about NFTs. I was sitting, this was about a year and a half ago, someone explained it to me. I thought it sounded ridiculous. I was one of those right-click save as things. I didn't understand it because it was what was being sold to me at the time as an outsider was this concept of digital ownership. And the problem I had with what I was owning was absurd. I didn't care about it. And so what I quickly realized was, oh, these people are creating intellectual property, but they have no idea how to create intellectual property. They are creating IP, i.e., a monkey, board Ape, and then you're digitizing it and you're creating ownership structures and all these things. But the people creating the intellectual property had no true understanding in my mind at the time of actual intellectual property. They didn't understand to monetize it or distribute it or what IP actually is and what it means. And so you go down this rabbit hole, the people who are most engaged in the community and the people that are creating the most things are creating it within this super small, exclusive, non-inclusive bubble where they're just speaking down to and amongst their own converts. And so when I got involved, I was like, media is the only vehicle that will convert the non-converted into this ecosystem. It's the only thing that will work. It translates. It's analogous because you have intellectual property, i.e., this board Ape, and then it goes there. So I was like, there has to be a video that's based off of this and we ran into the team that did the Red Ape family. And so it was based off the board Ape Yacht Club. And so we distributed the content and they had a really interesting model. They raised money. They had the IP. They owned the NFT. They created an animated series. The problem was the economics were heavily focused at the time on these sort of Web 3 tokenomics where you charge a lot of money for the NFT and that financed everything. And I was like, no, the guys, you should be giving this away. Like, why are you, you should be charging anything for it? Because the goal is if you can drive 100,000 people and incentivize them to watch an hour of your content a day, I can literally show you through math how you'll be making $6 million a year in revenue that you can then distribute back to your owners, even if it was free. Long story short, where we are today, again, I keep going back to the thought process of, okay, Web 3, not as a destination, but as a utility, as a thing that adds value to the consumers, has to be so seamless and easy that we're not requiring you to change how you consume content. Someone has to pay for it, by the way. You're either going to have to pay for it or an advertiser is going to support it. So one of the people, you have to monetize it in some way. And it has to be, I shouldn't have to have a wallet. I shouldn't have to understand cryptocurrencies, but there needs to be some value. And we're experimenting with you on a project where we launched the content before we launched the NFT. Exactly. Yeah. Because we're building the community through the content. Exactly. And then the content, the community will get engaged with that and start participating. And now you give them something to further that experience. And we have a proposition right up front and then convert. And we've talked a lot, Stephen, about how we built Solus, is you don't have to have a password. You don't even know you have a wallet. You're going to buy an NFT and not even know you bought an NFT. You just participated in some way. You supported in some way. Now you own something, but the technology behind it too often has led versus just been there. Well, the entertainment industry sees the audience as an inverted pyramid. There's the audience, the people who are going to watch it. There's the fans and then there's the collectors. And Web 3 right now has flipped it over. It's like, no, it's the collectors. And I'm like, that's just by far the hardest path. But Star Wars didn't start with all the collectibles. They built the world. The people got enthusiastic about the world. And now the collectibles have skyrocketed in value versus the opposite of what we've seen in the NFTs, where they skyrocketed and then plummeted because you had nothing to hold that up. And if you're implying that NFT ownership in some way in these projects, in for some sort of shared ownership of the IP or anything like that, that's awesome as long as it stays in this world. But the second you put it into the traditional system, where they acquire the intellectual property, it's no longer yours, which means it's no longer your NFT holders either. So it breaks the whole thing. There has to be something that allows that to exist. And that's going to come as a new model. I want to get to Mihai real quick because I want to involve Mihai real quick. Yeah, that's what I'm saying with what Mihai is doing with Beam is that something, I think where Web 3 is starting to emerge, and we talk about this a lot at Solis, is when I was an actor, I felt like an indentured servant. I felt like I've been never in control of my own career. And that was always a problem. Got fired with my Emmy reel in my hand when I was on One Life to Live, like literally going in to turn in my, because I was pre-nominated, and I lost my job that day. So like even when you're being recognized for good work, you don't have control of your career. And I think we built this entire company based on this idea that we want to give power back to talent in some way, give them control, give them at least a voice in their own IP. And I think that applies not just in front of camera talent, but we see a lot of streaming platforms are giving less and less ownership to IP creators. So what you're doing with Beam is really exciting, Mihai. I know you have an interesting perspective. How is Web 3 giving power back to creatives? And in what ways is that most exciting to you? I think we reached a point where we can't go any further with the platforms, right? We were dominated by five social media platforms, and we're dominated by five streamers. The problem with that is that creators don't own much. They're slaves of an algorithm, of a corporation, of the contracts that they have to sign to make a living. Web 3 is the first technology that the human race invented in millennia of history that allow organization an exchange of value without a central authority and without trusting anyone because we love people, but we know that they're not, we cannot trust them with power and money especially. And that technology allows us that, right? For the first time in our history. So let's use it in a smart way. And that's true. And users might not care about fundamental things. They want to enjoy their entertainment. So it's up to us to put a nice wrapper around it. But fundamentally, the essence, I think, is there. Is it worth to force engagement of audience to Web 3 Space? Because if we have this power to change it, we have platforms for users to change it. And but you think like they still can be engaged at some point. But maybe we can force it, not wait for when they will behave themselves naturally in Web 3 Space. Maybe we can force educational process. What do you think about this, Andrea? I think you kind of alluded to it earlier. I don't think we can force consumers to do anything. And we have to build good products and good experiences that are seamless. And you know, we have clients all the time who said, who ask us, can we not call it an NFT and they expect us to push back and want that. And we're like, no, let's brainstorm. Like, please, please, maybe they will be the ones to understand what the new term is or how to make it term less, I guess. But I don't think we can force consumers to do anything they don't want to do. And in fact, you know, 10 years ago, even 20 years ago, for sure, nobody asked about is this built on AWS or Microsoft Azure. Nobody even knew. Nobody cared. I think it's good that people care now, but we're almost over judgmental of this space thinking we learned how Web 2 has burned us and things that are happening with privacy and data. And so I think that's created like PTSD for people to be more skeptical about any new technology. So in one way, that's good, right? We want that we want people to be empowered with the knowledge. However, at the end of the day, so that won't drive we won't make forcing it possible. At the end of the day, though, we build great exciting technology, you know, when Snapchat started, like, that was weird, it was kind of odd, my little sister taught me how to use it and then it was super intuitive, at least when it launched, it was very intuitive. And it was so cool that it was creative and it didn't matter how it worked or what was behind the scenes. I'm waiting for that next Snapchat or tech. And one of my favorite things that I was telling Stephen about the other day is these aha moments that I'm having with friends and family who are skeptics. And I asked them when the last time I went to a sporting event, right, had you buy your ticket? So I got it from my friend. I said, Oh, they sent you a screenshot. No, I had to trans log in transfer ownership. And I'm like, Yeah, that's Web three. That's an NFT what you described. And I know I was like, Yeah, and then I, you know, pull out my Apple wallet. And that's a really great education piece to to show people like, you're already kind of doing this, but it's actually better for you if this is an NFT, because I could send you a screenshot of my Starbucks card and you can walk in and use it. If that was an NFT, that would be impossible. Right. And I think we're all talking about creators. And we're like, you know, this is better for the creators. And that's right. But it is better for traditional businesses to it solves real problems. And that's a lot of my focus in my industry. That's my career of empowering these executives with more information of how video technology works. Because it's really complicated. You know, it's easily underestimated. It's a behemoth of a beast. And it's, you know, I could go into it. It's like, today, I'm sure you're dealing with this now building your platform and having to use some web two elements and sub web three web two, it's like Frankenstein. And the business intelligence is all scattered. The margins get really difficult. Web three, of course, you can use different elements, but it doesn't look like Frankenstein stitched together. I think where executives, traditional media executives get spooked is they think they're losing control and power of what they know. And I'm trying to educate them of no, this is where everybody wins. You can build better products, you can have, you know, NFTs or mini contracts directly with your consumers. You know, we're still in an era where we're looking for mass adoption of something that's micro adoption right now. And we're in an era where we all probably still know someone who won't buy something online because they don't want to put their credit card, right? They see you tap your phone to something and their mind is blown, but they still know how to go see a movie. They still know how to turn on a TV and watch something. That experience doesn't change. And that's what we're talking about here, right? Keeping that consistent, just changing the mechanisms behind the door. One of the challenges that we have right now in this space is that Web, what Web three does really well is it solves a problem for creators, financiers, I think. That's a big part of what we focus on is de-risking, utilizing what Web three is good at to actually de-risk financiers. I don't know that Web three is really solving a problem for consumers yet. Right now, the lift is higher than the benefit. And I think that will change. This is just, it's Moore's law, a version of Moore's law. Things will get better, they'll get faster, it'll become more frictionless. But the reason why Netflix destroyed Blockbuster was not with technology. It was with the U.S. Postal Service. They recognize that getting in your car and driving to Blockbuster and standing in line to rent your movie and then bring it home and then, God forbid, don't forget to bring it back or else you'll pay a huge late fee. That was a pain in the ass. And they were like, Netflix was like, we'll mail it to you. So if we're talking 2000s, like pets.com, right? It's like the reason pets.com failed, the infrastructure wasn't set up, the delivery, the overnight, the postage, all the things that made what is now Amazon drone dropping off cat food into your overnight or the same hour, it took two decades to get there. So consumers are ready to adopt as soon as it fits into their existing content or consumer purchasing, decision making trees, etc. So I agree with you. I think from a business case, it's like the ability to finance content, distribute royalties, transfer ownership, contain digital goods and digital sort of assets, and then utilizing that cross-platform, entities are amazing for them. But this needed to happen. We needed to have a complete implosion of the crypto economy to stop it in its tracks, because it became a Ponzi, you know, as I like to say, maybe it's not pyramid scheme, but it's pyramid shaped ecosystem that fed itself and was communicating to the converted and was just stock trading for companies that had no basis in actual value or value creation. So now we have to go back to the basics. We're starting over and it's like, okay, let the dust settle. Now it's time to build real utility. And a couple of things too was like, number one, you know, this sort of NFT craze is two years old. I mean, maybe if you're an OG, it's three years old. You know, I've been in the media business for 20 years. It's always going to be easier for me to at least comprehend and adopt and adapt a two or three year old technology and utilize it for my business expertise, as it is for someone who's only been in the NFT space for two or three years and understand 20 years of media. And if we tie it back into what you said, what we've all talked about, like if you talk about how Netflix has disrupted, how long did they deliver DVDs before they became what they are now? Oh, sure. Right. So you have to, you have to continue to innovate. And, and we talked about this an earlier panel, listen to really to evolve and continue to move forward to find where that, if we are looking at disruption, where that disruption and that comfortability is. As Andrea, you're right to put it, people don't even imagine what they can do with NFTs because they don't even understand that. Why would they, right? But I'm saying you didn't hold an iPhone in your hands. You just consider that your flip phone is amazing until you have that in your hand and say, oh my God, right? Well, until you experience something that's really cool like that, you don't need it anymore. So I believe that we should, you know, understand where we are in time, right? We are pretty much in 1998. People try to know, why do I need the internet? I mean, I need to buy a computer and modem for what? You know, the yellow pages, I have them here. Why do I need email? You know, my, my auntie has a fax machine too. So it's easy. I think we're going to get there. But, you know, step by step, we're going to realize all those things, how they're going to happen. We can still hear the dial tone of the dial up and we hear that. Like that's, that's what we're hearing right now. And we're still playing a little bit of Mind Sweeper, a little bit of Solitaire. We're figuring it out. The stories are their own utility. Yes. Right. Don't forget that. I mean, like, if it can make you change your mind or make you feel something or make you stand up and yell, that's utility. And that's the power of entertainment to really bring people into this. We want to empower creatives with this technology because they will be the ones to build the cool shits. Sorry. But it's true, right? Because they, I'm, I'm a technologist and technology people can only build so much and understand the consumer. That's really what my job is, is to help business groups understand technology groups and vice versa. But the more that we empower creators and help them figure it out, they're going to go build the next Snapchat. They're going to go figure out what this new creative product that's going to have mass adoption because that's their specialty, right? Their creative were the builders. And I think that's really important part. Serve the creatives and the audience will follow. Yeah. Look, we could talk about this forever. And we kind of have. We should. Here we have. And we will. I think this, the whole point of this series is conversation starters. But that's the point is like we are, we are still in the infancy. And, and we will be figuring it out as we go. But that's exciting. And it is exciting and honoring both creatives and audience, the entire, and, and not necessarily what's in between, which I think has been too much of the focus over the past few decades. So thank you all for joining. Mihai from Beam, Stephen from Benjable, Andrea from Theta, Josh from Ronan and Anastasia from Cointelegraph. I'm Brett from Solis and thanks for watching. Thank you.