mochet
commented
1 year ago The below link explains this idea quite easily:
MUBI aims to list every film - of any length - ever made, regardless of whether or not it’s currently playing on MUBI. To ensure your film is published as quickly as possible, please read the following:
https://mubi.com/contribute/films/new
This is a bit of a wild idea that may or may not become relevant to our platform, but there is precedent from some different platforms when it comes to this idea so it is worth thinking about--Steam is a video game marketplace and software distribution program and it is dominant in the marketplace, people enjoy its social features a lot, but other companies started trying to build their own marketplaces to compete and when some publishers stopped selling games on Steam or would only sell the games on external platforms, Steam still allowed users to utilize its social features on top of the external products.
Spotify also takes a similar approach. If music from an artist isn't available within Spotify's content library, a user is able to still import whatever music they want. This gives the end user the convenience of not having to use multiple applications for listening to music and the ability to access it all from one source.
In both of these examples, the platform being agnostic to the origin of products was an extremely valuable thing to do. It allows usage of their platform's features but doesn't require exclusivity.
It is one strategy that may be relevant and impactful when it comes to attracting users and building a content library that is extremely large.
For the platform to be successful it is crucial for it to attract users and because of this building growth is not going to be easy. Some users may visit because of the content and others may visit because of their personal social relationships.
If users already have content or followers on other web3 services, it would mean there could be substantial friction for them to start using Joystream--they would be somewhat forced into picking between platforms and they would likely be expected to abandon the value they've put into a different platform.
Basically they'd be able to import content from the other platforms they've used, but rather than actually uploading files, the content would just be registered on-chain so that it can exist within Joystream and contain Joystream-relevant metadata. There could of course be scripts and services which mirror a channel or content from another network and reupload it entirely onto Joystream but that would be different. You would be able to import any video, from any service, without actually uploading the video file onto Joystream--it would just be metadata and social features.
This could also apply to creating NFTs within Joystream that are connected to external platforms. The reason for doing this would be dependent on the value our NFT marketplace has. If it has substantial value and high activity, it may be that we end up benefitting in the long term by not caring what platform the content originated on.
This would basically result in trying to retain and expand the value of Joystream and its associated gateway's social graphs while not necessarily requiring content that even originate or fully exists on Joystream. The benefit of this is that if there are other successful web3 video platforms, it would be possible for us to drastically minimize the friction when it comes to new users joining.
This concept may be something that gateways can do entirely by themselves if they decide to, they could incorporate content from multiple platforms onto one gateway. Additionally to all of this, gateways could actually feature external content with no specific agreement or permission given.
This would allow for Joystream DAO to work on delivering phenomenal social tooling when it comes to content metadata--if the source of the video didn't matter but it was still able to utilize Joystream's categorization and tagging tools then it could result in huge numbers of users and less dependence on having to create our own high quality content. It could also mean that if the quality of our content curation was particularly high, or that our commenting or subscription features were great, that users could access the world from within Joystream rather than having to pick & choose between competing video services.
There could perhaps be a way for the creator of the content to claim it on Joystream through some sort of verification process, which would allow them to step into our ecosystem and already have a prebuilt audience, subscribers, comments and everything else.
It may be that the content working gruop or another new dedicated working group could work on importing these external videos. They wouldn't have monetizaiton features enabled and they would probably be owned by "ghost" channels which are also just a store of metadata. Then an owner, if able to prove their ownership of the source content, could be given ownership of the ghost channel and all of its videos.
(I won't cover the obvious issues of how you'd actually enable playback of external videos, that would depend on which service was hosting the videos. They could theoretically by hired as gateways by Joystream.)
This also allows for:
TikTok combines the zero cost nature of user-generated content with a purely algorithmic feed that is divorced from your network; there is a network effect, in that TikTok needs lots of content to choose from, but it doesn’t need your specific network.That, though, is exceptionally challenging in the real world: remember, creating games, particularly their art, is expensive, and the expense increases the more immersive the experience is. Social media, on the other hand, is cheap because it uses user-generated content, but that content is generally stuck on more basic mediums — text, pictures, and only recently video. Of course that content doesn’t necessarily need to be limited to your network — an algorithm can deliver anything on the network to any user.To put it another way, I was too focused on demand — the key to Aggregation Theory — and didn’t think deeply enough about the evolution of supply. User-generated content didn’t have to be simply picture of pets and political rants from people in one’s network; it could be the foundation of a new kind of network, where the payoff from Metcalfe’s Law is not the number of connections available to any one node, but rather the number of inputs into a customized feed.This, by the way, is actually a much more accurate manifestation of Metcalfe’s Law, which is about potential contacts in a network, not actual contacts; a long-standing criticism of using Metcalfe’s Law to describe social networks is that the attractiveness of most social networks is a function of how many people you know that are on the network, not how many you might knowhttps://stratechery.com/2021/mistakes-and-memes/
Notice how this business — in its mechanics, if not its financial numbers — looks more like a Google or a Facebook than a Netflix: Spotify isn’t earning money by making margin on its content spend; rather, it is seeking to enable more content than ever, confident that it controls the best means to surface the content users want. Those means can then be sold to the highest bidder, with all of the margin going to Spotify. Spotify calls this promotion — it certainly looks a lot like the old radio model of pay-to-play — but that’s really just another word for advertising. Moreover, this isn’t Spotify’s only advertising business: the company has long been building an ad-supported music business, and is now heavily investing in doing the same for podcasting (which has always clearly been [an aggregation strategy](https://stratechery.com/2019/spotifys-podcast-aggregation-play/)).https://stratechery.com/2022/spotify-netflix-and-aggregation/