Tokenising Video on Demand

It has always baffled me why VOD platforms don’t make more use of gamification to drive engagement. The daily collection of free tokens in the form of coins, energy, candies, gems etc. is omnipresent in casual gaming and becoming increasingly common on websites too. The behavioural scientists can no doubt explain why we love collecting (free) things, but this simple trick is extremely effective at driving daily engagement. Daily engagement in turn keeps apps and websites high in their respective rankings which can, in turn, attract new users. And, once driven to the app to collect your daily ‘drop’, clever UX should keep you there so increasing dwell time and other engagement KPIs.

With so many VOD platforms now competing for our attention, it would seem that a daily habit of opening the app to collect tokens would be an enormous advantage, especially for the smaller services that might be overlooked as people default to the bigger brands with the bigger marketing budgets.

The next stage of gamification would be to earn further tokens the more you watch. Twenty tokens for a TV episode, thirty for a longer movie. Ten tokens just for watching the first five minutes (first party analytics would define the correct cut-off point when trial becomes engagement). Bonuses for season and series completion. Brand new series can borrow supermarket loyalty tactics to offer double token rewards to incentivise trial. The promotional applications go on and on.

But aside from the fun of collecting them, what is the point of holding these tokens?

Well firstly, point mean prizes. Subscribers will ‘level up’ depending on the number of tokens they have and with each new level come greater rewards such as early previews, bonus content and even discounted or free transactional VOD (TVOD) – common benefits employed by the likes of Sky VIP. Levels would have names matching the identity of the platform where a kids’ service might borrow terms from the NFT space like Ultra Rare and Legendary. More on NFTs below…

But the biggest opportunity presented by Web 3.0 blockchain technology is for the tokens to have real financial value on a secondary market. Imagine a future where Netflix mints an $NFX token via an initial coin offering (ICO) that is openly traded on the crypto exchanges. Speculators and investors will trade the token and it will have real, and potentially increasing, financial value. Then subscribers who have earned $NFX from logging in daily and watching content, can sell their tokens or HODL them for future gains. Now you are effectively getting paid to binge that one extra episode past twelve on a school night.

But the benefits of tokenisation don’t stop there.

Once a VOD token with real-world value has been minted further derivative applications become possible. And one such example is decentralised advertising. The Brave Attention Token ($BAT), Decentr ($DEC) and Verasity ($VRA) are all developing revolutionary new business models for how advertisers, publishers and audiences exchange value. Crucially with user data privacy a central feature. The decentralised model means no middleware ad tech to swallows the majority of the budget, and again the audience is paid – in tokens - for their time & attention. Tokens that as we have seen can have real-world value.

As an aside, tokenisation could even help with the problem of password sharing. If I am using someone else’s login for free, but at the same time I know I am generating a large amount of valuable tokens for them from my viewing, at what point does the value of those tokens exceed the cost of a subscription?

Lastly, and maybe most excitingly for VOD is the booming world of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). NFTs are one-of-a-kind digital assets, which are publicly authenticated to the blockchain, certifying they are both original and unique. While the applications for NFTs are almost endless, the most easily understood are digital art and digital collectibles. Kudos to Freemantle for their release of their American Gods NFTs which are now selling on Open Sea for upward of 10x their offer price. But apart from these, there are very few officially licensed television or film NFTs currently available. But I am sure this is about to change. Video content, especially the IP that attains cult status, is perfect for NFTs. Imagine collecting unique character cards from The Walking Dead, Doctor Who or Star Wars. Imagine how much an even more limited edition Cara Dune NFT would now be worth? Not just characters cards, but NFTs can be videos meaning classic television moments can be sold, think Del Boy’s Bar or The Vicar of Dibley’s Puddle. Whole archives of shorts could be re-awakened from their YouTube slumber. And again, these NFTs can be traded on crypto markets using the native token of the platform further building that token’s financial value.

While the price of Bitcoin gets more and more news coverage, it is in fact the Web 3.0 blockchain technology beneath it that is quietly changing the world. Finance is already starting to bend to the impact of DeFi, supply chain logistics are moving on-chain and video will surely join them all soon.

Christian Brent,

Managing Director, Damask Consulting

www.damaskconsulting.com