Earlier today I read an article about a TV show called Blockchain that was funded initially on Steemit.com. It was interesting to read the story, and it is cool to see a project like that get a start when it may have struggled to get traditional financing. But, the method was essentially the same type of crowdfunding we have seen for a decade.
People send in dollars, or Steem, or whatever currency they prefer and they pre-order their access to the project. Being able to do this with Cryptocurrency means that you can lower the cost of financial middlemen, but it isn’t a fundamental shift. What is really fun to think about is when you don’t just crowdfund a project by pre-ordering or donation, but instead actually buy equity in the project.
With a token, you could do an ICO to raise the funds for a movie or TV show, then the purchases of the project in the future could be smart contracts that disperse the money to the various accounts who initially bought into the project.
Say 1000 people pay $1000 for the initial ICO. You have $1,000,000 to start the project, then 6 months down the road, when it is released for sale to the public, you sell it exclusively online and the revenue is split evenly between the 1000 owners. To save money on the transaction fees you could set it to pool the money and disperse it every to weeks to the holders of the tokens.
A set up like this would make it possible to not only get funding for your project from your fans, but also from people who just think that your project will make money. It would create a secondary market for ownership, where someone could buy the ownership tokens after the fact and then go out and work to market the movie.
We’re quite a ways off from something like this existing, but it very cool to think about movie, tv, or music projects being financed this way.
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