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The Rise of Blockchain-Powered Video Streaming: An Exclusive Interview with Replay CEO Michael Jelen
The video streaming landscape is now at a crossroads. Traditional platforms continue to play by their own rules, and there are palpable concerns about transparency and creator compensation. However, with blockchain technology offering a revolutionary approach to streaming and promising a more just and equitable video economy, is the future of traditional video streaming hanging in the balance?
Curious about this new paradigm, Olayimika Oyebanji turned to Michael Jelen, the new CEO of Replay, for valuable insights into the emerging frontier of video streaming.
Can you tell us briefly about yourself and your journey to web3?
I started my career in traditional financial advisory. I worked on the Madoff investigation and the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in the United States. After seeing some of the challenges and flaws of the traditional financial system, I moved to Europe where I spent about 10 years working with large financial institutions, mainly dealing with OFAC compliance, specifically designated nationals and various types of sanctioned lists for USD-denominated transactions in the SWIFT banking system.
So, I got to see a lot about KYC and some of the things that we’re currently struggling with regulation in the cryptocurrency space today. All of those things have really led me to be open-minded about creating a new financial system if and when that opportunity presents itself.
And the first time I had an opportunity to see that in the cryptocurrency space was when I was working in Abu Dhabi helping write the blockchain adoption policy and strategy. And while I was there, that was my first opportunity to dream big and see what was possible with this technology, and then during COVID, I spent some time in the US working with different DAOs and protocols that were focused on decentralization and empowering people away from big financial institutions. And that eventually led to me working with a lot of different clients in the consulting space, one of which was Replay.
What are traditional video streaming platforms and how do they differ from decentralized models?
Major traditional video streaming platforms include well-known names for curated content like Netflix, AppleTV, and HBO, as well as user-generated content like YouTube. While compensation models and terms vary between these platforms, the terms are set by these large entities, dictating when, how much, and how often creators are paid for their work. In many cases, payments take 9-12 months, and in some cases, creators must meet a minimum before they are paid. Analytics vary from platform to platform, but providing granularity and transparency into viewer analytics is not a priority.
Replay, as a leader in the decentralized streaming space, pays creators immediately when any content is watched. Blockchain provides transparency and puts the role of content selection, fee structure, and roadmap in the hands of the community. It also allows the community to create their own content or derivative content, which is something we have been moving toward lately and see as an exciting future for content streaming.
Besides limited transparency, what are the other shortcomings of traditional video streaming services?
As I have previously highlighted, other challenges are the remuneration model for creators, censorship and centralized curation.
We want to get to a point where we don’t have permissions anymore, where anyone can upload anything, much like YouTube does. So that’s something we’re moving toward and I think it’s going to be really important to allow the community to take control of curation.
Real-time licensing and payments are a hallmark of blockchain streaming. How does this system work from the perspective of both creators and viewers?
Take the RPLAY token as an example. It is the foundation of the ecosystem that connects content creators, viewers, advertisers, AI tools, and any other participants in the ecosystem. As AI becomes more and more important as a method of creating new content, it is important that derivative content properly attributes value and rewards the original creators, which is not the case with most AI at the moment. These innovative licensing structures benefit creators and provide a flexible framework for monetizing community-driven or AI-generated derivative content.
Is there room for traditional and decentralized models to coexist?
Of course, there is room for collaboration and coexistence! It is up to users to vote with their feet, and a competitor is just a click away. Whoever brings the best content to the table wins. Replay is creating the most creator-friendly environment for videos, which will attract the strongest creators, thus providing the best content to our community.
What can you tell us about the founding of Replay and your appointment as the new CEO?
While I wasn’t at Replay when it was founded, I’ve been working alongside the team for over six months and am no stranger to the company. The transition to CEO has been a very natural one, as Krish and Dan have spent more time building the AI capabilities that will underpin many of Replay’s future AI creation tools, while Maddy continues to lead our incredibly powerful engineering team. I’m inspired every day by the team and their capabilities and honored to be here.
I am super excited to be here. I think I have some really unique skills that I bring to the table both in terms of cryptocurrencies, web3 networks and relationships to be able to raise capital and coordinate with different blockchains and develop strong partnerships, taking us to the next phase of growth that we are currently involved in.
I also have a lot of contacts in the traditional film industry and I think as we try to make Replay the best environment for people to build in, it’s going to be critical to have those people on our side as trusted allies and provide them with the platform on which they can build and create new content. So, bringing all of these unique skill sets to the table, I’m very proud to be a part of this organization; the entire team is great and fun to work with.
What are some of the key aspects that decentralized models need to address to be successful in the long term?
I think the biggest one is governance and leadership. Anyone will tell you that building a difficult, complex product in a decentralized way is basically impossible. The common example that everyone uses is the iPhone. Like if you had a decentralized organization, you wouldn’t have the leadership and the vision from the top to achieve something that’s so radically transformative. And I think we’re in the same situation with Replay.
So for that reason, we’re starting more centrally to build the infrastructure, execute the vision, and get it to a critical mass point where everyone else can pick it up and run with it. Our plan is to build it centrally, which we’ve done, get to a huge amount of adoption, and then continue to decentralize that protocol and allow others to take it from there.
We want the community to be able to shape what content is allowed in, what content is not allowed or interesting on the platform, and also create that toolset for creators to be able to create the best content as quickly as possible, so. We need everyone. This is a team effort. It just starts with a clear, communicated, centralized vision, and then we decentralize and give the decision-making to the community.
How do you face these challenges?
It’s pretty simple: start centrally to achieve the mission, then decentralize and hand it over to the people. It’s worked for many other protocols and will continue to evolve.
Can you tell us a success story?
Cyko KO. This is a comic book and the cast of Napoleon Dynamite and the creator is Rob Feldman, who I actually created a Twitter space with. What they did was see if we could do a kind of end-to-end monetization experiment to create new content. So the first thing we did was crowdfund it by selling NFTs, which gave people credit for being producers.
So at that point, those people with that NFT would have limited viewing opportunities so they could be the first to see that content when it came out. We also trained AI models on that content so we could create derivative content off of it. So that would be and I’ll also send you a demo of that so you can check it out. But you could type into a chatbot, “hey, create me a new scene or create me a trailer where a psychopath fights a giant spider.”
And that’s the same kind of thing that would allow us in the future to say, hey, “I want to see scene number one, but tell it from this other character’s point of view.” The possibilities are endless, but we’ve seen that as a proof of concept, we can do that and execute it, and it’s a very exciting technology.
What this means as a success story, and why it’s so important, is that we can go all the way from an idea through crowdfunding, through creation, have a decentralized group of individuals who have funded and created this thing and then create derivative content, all of which can be monetized. And every single time someone watches this, everyone involved can get compensated and paid for it. It’s radical and it’s like a Kickstarter for video content. We’re just scratching the surface. But I think it’s an extremely exciting, good example and something that we’re very excited to continue to develop for future creators.
Any words of farewell?
The main thing I want to focus on here is that crypto and blockchain technology as a whole is the opportunity to give power back to the people. The video streaming world is highly centralized. You’re dealing with a handful of players like Netflix, YouTube, etc., and it’s very difficult for a small creator or an independent creator to be able to fight or negotiate with that.
Replay recognizes that with tools like I, more and more people can become creators and everyone is freelance. We are all working on different projects.
Never before have we had the opportunity for these people to come together and create independent content of the same caliber or a caliber that is highly driven by Tier 1 that people want to watch. And now that we have that ability, there needs to be a distribution channel that is creator-friendly, that rewards these people, and that also provides them with any kind of technology or AI tools to enable them to do their work better and faster.
It’s also community-driven, and people and communities will set the precedent for what kind of content they want to watch. So if you have a group of people who are interested in taking their own life or telling their story and using text-generative AI on video, they can create content, publish it, watch it, and monetize it. And so anyone becomes a creator. We cater to both high-end creators, and people who are interested in going through a different monetization platform, and every single creator, and that’s what Replay is all about. We’re incredibly excited about the power that blockchain technology provides, and we can’t wait to be the platform that brings that to the world.