Anti-piracy blockchain prototype test success
February 20, 2019
By Colin Mann
Cloud-based video experience solutions provider Linius Technologies has successfully tested what it claims is the world’s first video blockchain, opening new distribution, protection and monetisation possibilities to the global video industry.
By applying its video virtualisation technology, Linius successfully used smart contracts to control and transact video as a digital asset within blockchain – for the first time. According to Chris Richardson, Linius CEO, the breakthrough has the ability to solve video piracy as we know it today. “With virtual video embedded within each block of the blockchain, smart contracts can be used to control the transactions associated with video files,” he advised. “For the first time, content owners – such as movie studios – can have complete control and visibility over video distribution and access. Video assets and viewers can be validated prior to playing the video, eliminating improper play out of the video.”
“This is particularly exciting, because it demonstrates that the protective power of blockchain can be applied directly to video – just as it is to cryptocurrency today – to effectively address the world’s multi-billion-dollar piracy problem.”
According to Digital TV Research’s Online TV Piracy Forecasts report, worldwide revenues lost to online television and movie piracy will reach $52 billion by 2022 – almost twice that incurred in 2016.
In addition to secure content distribution, Richardson suggests that video blockchain would facilitate superior monetisation of video content, enabling built-in payment gateways, automated royalty payments, and even peer-to-peer transactions. “Linius feels this is the natural evolution of its anti-piracy strategy, and will use blockchain to protect, distribute as well as monetise the video itself,” says Richardson. “It’s now possible for all video stakeholders to have an auditable trail of how many times a video is played, and be instantly compensated at the time of play, based on digital contracts.”
“With the ability for content owners and studios to distribute and monetise content with guaranteed tracking and royalty payments, including enabling paid consumer-to-consumer content sharing, the Linius Video Blockchain is set to transform the entire world of video production and distribution,” he declared.
The details of the successful test are as follows:
- Linius virtualised several videos of different sizes, stored in the cloud on Amazon S3
- On a private instance of Ethereum (a world-leading, blockchain-based distributed computing platform), Linius generated a smart contract to control transactions against the virtual video
- Linius then successfully uploaded the virtual video into the blockchain, executed the smart contract transaction (with associated mining), and successfully retrieved a copy of the virtual video based on the criteria of the contract
- That retrieved virtual video was then validated with ISOviewer
The successful prototype test follows Linius’s December 2017 announcement of its intentions to deliver the world’s first video blockchain, coinciding with the publication of its video blockchain strategy.
The Linius Video Blockchain prototype will be launched within the first quarter of calendar year 2019, on Linius Video Services (LVS) – the company’s software-as-a-service platform: http://lvs.linius.com
Linius’s patented Video Virtualization Engine (VVE) makes video blockchain possible by breaking-down video into small blocks of data, creating virtual video files. A fraction of a per cent of the original video file size, virtual video files can be easily transferred and managed by blockchain.
“With traditional video, a blockchain would be impossibly big,” says Richardson. “And, the Internet standard video format MP4 does not work in blockchain. Virtual videos, however, are ideally suited to digital assets, which can be recorded, transferred and managed by a blockchain,” he notes.