Yesterday, Variety reported that a new working group for blockchain in the film industry is to be established. The revealed participants are blockchain for entertainment firms Badel Media and The Lumiere Project, along with China’s biggest law firm, Yingke Law.
Representatives from each company will talk at an American Film Market panel later today. They will discuss how blockchain can be used for rights management, film financing, production, and distribution. According to Variety, they will additionally establish the working group.
Badel Media founder Manuel Badel said: “To better understand the applications and potential impact of blockchain approaches, we need structures involving industry stakeholders. It would be a sort of sandbox without borders where collaboration in experimentation, sharing of expertise, but also access to financing and markets will be among the main benefits.”
Indeed, both Badel Media and Lumiere apply blockchain to film financing. Before founding the firm, Manuel Badel initiated the first blockchain project in Canadian broadcasting with Groupe Média TFO. Meanwhile, Lumiere founder Patrice Poujol published his book, ‘Online Film Production in China Using Blockchain and Smart Contracts’, earlier this year.
Lumiere’s primary offering is blockchain platform Elemis, which brings transparency and efficiency to film production. Not only is information regarding funding and distribution stored in the trusted system, but smart contracts also allow cast and crew to be paid automatically.
The firm claims that independent productions and co-productions lose 10% of their budgets through corruption. Its platform hopes to tackle this while saving costs and ensuring staff are fairly reimbursed.
Yingke Law’s Jesse Weiner focuses on intellectual property and entertainment finance cases, having represented multiple Chinese and Western production firms. He also founded a blockchain project company with Mike Tyson.
In entertainment, Overstock’s tZERO has film tokenization deals with BLOQ FLIX and Vision Tree, the latter to fund an Atari picture. US actor Wesley Snipes launched a movie funding token with Liechtenstein Cryptoassets Exchange two months ago.
