Deploying blockchains for a new paradigm of media experience

Abstract

In this paper, we demonstrate the multiple points of innovation when combining multimedia content with blockchain technology. As of today, content creators (authors, photographers, radio and video reporters, data visualizers etc.) are publishing and sharing content (articles, photos, audio, video and combinations) on media/social networks but without the effective control over who is going to reuse this content. To this direction, we introduce a blockchain based service which successfully blends different technologies to provide more transparency on how the content is further tracked, promote openness, trust and security between participants, allow direct monetization for the content creator and expose the benefits of using blockchain technology as: a database of multimedia content, a novel payment method while using a dedicated created cryptocurrency, an insurance of proof of ownership through the exploitation of smart contracts running on Ethereum blockchain platform and a means to implement new solutions to value content based on quality. Additionally, by integrating Hyperledger Projects (Fabric, Composer, Explorer), we examine how their functionalities such as private and permissioned blockchain improve our system. Highlighting the importance of applications exploiting blockchain technology to efficiently support, store and retrieve data we utilized, integrated with blockchain and compared different solutions among which InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and traditional databases such as MongoDB with GridFS tool.