Why firms from Banijay to Beta Film are exploring NFT’s – TBI Vision

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Peaky Blind­ers is among the shows Ban­i­jay expects to be pop­u­lar with NFT buy­ers from its con­tent catalogue

From Ban­i­jay to Beta Film, TV com­pa­nies are active­ly explor­ing how NFTs could help gen­er­ate future rev­enues. Tim Dams inves­ti­gates the oppor­tu­ni­ties being opened up by this rel­a­tive­ly new market

The mar­ket for dig­i­tal items known as non-fun­gi­ble tokens (NFTs) explod­ed in pop­u­lar­i­ty last year, and the TV indus­try has tak­en notice.

Near­ly $41bn was spent on NFTs in 2021 accord­ing to a recent Finan­cial Times report, which con­clud­ed that the mar­ket is almost as valu­able as the glob­al art market.

NFTs are essen­tial­ly dig­i­tal own­er­ship cer­tifi­cates reg­is­tered on a blockchain, a pub­lic dig­i­tal ledger that allows any­one to ver­i­fy the NFT’s authen­tic­i­ty and who owns it.

Unlike most dig­i­tal items which can be eas­i­ly repro­duced, each NFT has a unique dig­i­tal sig­na­ture, mean­ing it is one of a kind. This makes them valu­able to col­lec­tors, allow­ing them to be trad­ed on sec­ondary mar­kets, where their prices rise and fall accord­ing to demand. NFTs are usu­al­ly bought with cryp­tocur­ren­cies or in dol­lars and the blockchain keeps a record of transactions.

Market to bounce back

NFTs real­ly came to pub­lic atten­tion last year when a col­lage by the artist Beeple sold for $69.3m at auc­tion­eer Christie’s and Twit­ter founder Jack Dorsey sold the first ever Tweet for over $2.9m.

Mean­while, NFT col­lec­tions such as Cryp­toP­unks and Bored Ape Yacht Club have gone viral. Bored Ape NFTs now reg­u­lar­ly trade for hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars, with one sell­ing for $2.85m in January.

Famous­ly, sports bod­ies such as the Ulti­mate Fight­ing Cham­pi­onship (UFC), the Nation­al Bas­ket­ball Asso­ci­a­tion (NBA) and the Nation­al Foot­ball League (NFL) have teamed with Cana­di­an NFT com­pa­ny Dap­per­Labs to launch pop­u­lar NFT mar­ket­places, offer­ing icon­ic sport­ing moments and high­lights as NFTs.

The appeal of NFTs is per­plex­ing to many, who won­der why so much mon­ey is spent on items that only exist in dig­i­tal form and can be viewed by any­one for free.

Cer­tain­ly, the mar­ket has cooled this year, with the Ukraine war and a broad­er tech and cryp­tocur­ren­cy slump abat­ing the trad­ing fren­zy that char­ac­terised 2021. Accord­ing to the Finan­cial Times, dai­ly trad­ing vol­umes on OpenSea, the biggest mar­ket­place for NFTs, fell 80% to rough­ly $50m in March after reach­ing a record peak of $248m in February.

Despite this, many advo­cates believe this is just a dip in an NFT mar­ket­place that is only like­ly to grow in the long term.

TV industry takes notice

The TV indus­try, in par­tic­u­lar, is start­ing to explore the poten­tial for NFTs.

Superindie group Ban­i­jay, for exam­ple, is set to dip its toe in the water lat­er this year by offer­ing NFTs based on the glob­al­ly pop­u­lar Mr Bean ani­ma­tion series, which is pro­duced through sub­sidiary Tiger Aspect.

“Any con­tent cre­ator, or any­one with as much con­tent as Ban­i­jay, needs to be look­ing at NFTs and tak­ing them seri­ous­ly” Owain Wal­by­off, Banijay

“We’re treat­ing NFTs like a brand-new com­mer­cial cat­e­go­ry,” says Ban­i­jay chief com­mer­cial offi­cer Owain Wal­by­off. “Any con­tent cre­ator, or any­one with as much con­tent as Ban­i­jay, needs to be look­ing into this and tak­ing it seriously.”

Rights hold­ers like Ban­i­jay can licence their con­tent to NFT spe­cial­ists to cre­ate NFT prod­ucts to launch into the mar­ket, receiv­ing a per­cent­age of sales.

As well as Mr Bean, Ban­i­jay is plan­ning to launch two or three oth­er NFTs this year based on its IP. “We’re all very excit­ed by this. The pro­jec­tions that the licencees are giv­ing us [show] it is a high val­ue cat­e­go­ry,” says Walbyoff.

As well as sup­ply­ing the assets for Mr Bean to a licencee to cre­ate and sell the NFT prod­ucts, Ban­i­jay will help sup­port its launch in the NFT mar­ket­place. Mr Bean, notes Wal­by­off, has mil­lions of fans across dig­i­tal plat­forms such as Insta­gram, Twit­ter and Tik­Tok, and is the num­ber one TV brand on Face­book with 129 mil­lion followers.

“We would help them to pro­mote it and encour­age peo­ple to pur­chase the NFTs. And then we would share in the prof­its, like any oth­er licens­ing deal,” says Wal­by­off, who is telling his com­mer­cial col­leagues at Ban­i­jay to regard NFTs in a sim­i­lar vein to, say, a Mas­terChef cook­ware deal.

Eye­ing the Ban­i­jay cat­a­logue, Wal­by­off cites script­ed con­tent such as Black Mir­ror and Peaky Blind­ers as the kinds of shows like­ly to be pop­u­lar with NFT buy­ers who want to “own some­thing unique” from them.

He says that the NFTs could be more than just dig­i­tal images but could also unlock video con­tent that pos­si­bly hasn’t been tele­vised before.

This offer of video con­tent chimes with broad­er trends in the mar­ket. Many peo­ple think of NFTs as sta­t­ic dig­i­tal art­works, but NFTs from the likes of the NBA and UFC go fur­ther by offer­ing footage of key moments, be it a cel­e­brat­ed slam dunk or a knockout.

Feeling of ownership

Else­where, Ger­man pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion giant Beta Film is also active­ly explor­ing the NFT market.

It is part­ner­ing with Aus­tri­an NFT spe­cial­ists MovieShots to offer NFTs from the cult Ger­man film Run Lola Run (Lola Ren­nt). Sched­uled for mid-April, around 1,400 NFTs from the film are being sold by MovieShots at a price of approx­i­mate­ly €200, which would gen­er­ate €280,000 if it sold out.

Aus­tri­an NFT spe­cial­ists MovieShots offer NFTs from the cult Ger­man film Run Lola Run (Lola Ren­nt)

The role of the NFT spe­cial­ist is impor­tant, says MovieShots founder Jan Leit­en­bauer. “There are many areas to think about. In addi­tion to pro­gram­ming on the blockchain, NFT cre­ation and defin­ing the prop­er­ties of around 1,400 indi­vid­ual images, a com­mu­ni­ty has to be built up and looked after,” he explains. The ambi­tion is to give NFT own­ers the feel­ing that they own a piece of the movie.

Beta Film’s Alexan­der Wolf­fers­dorff says the com­pa­ny had heard about the hype behind NFTs when it was approached by MovieShots to explore the idea of cre­at­ing NFT “col­lec­tors’ items” from its library of content.

He says that what makes NFTs par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing is that they are trade­able on sec­ondary mar­kets, thanks to the blockchain tech­nol­o­gy that pro­vides proof of ownership.

The blockchain also stores smart con­tracts which are auto­mat­i­cal­ly exe­cut­ed with each sale, allow­ing the rights hold­er to auto­mat­i­cal­ly earn a share of rev­enue from each trade. This is typ­i­cal­ly around 3–5% of the sell­ing price but can be as high as 10%.

“There is a con­stant rev­enue stream if an item should be suc­cess­ful,” says Wolffersdorff.

As in a tra­di­tion­al licenc­ing or mer­chan­dis­ing deal, rev­enues are shared among rights hold­ers. It’s impor­tant to involve key stake­hold­ers, says Banijay’s Wal­by­off. “We want every­body to be onside and hap­py. If we did some­thing with Black Mir­ror, we would always want Net­flix and the orig­i­nal cre­ators of Black Mir­ror to be on board with it, behind it and buy­ing into it. It just gives the licence pro­duced – the NFT – a far greater chance of success.”

Beta Film is now think­ing about which of its titles might be suit­able for NFTs next and plans to offer tokens for a black-and-white com­e­dy clas­sic from its library.

Innovative ideas

Oth­er TV com­pa­nies are explor­ing NFTs in inno­v­a­tive ways. Wildlife broad­cast­er Wild Earth TV, for exam­ple, recent­ly launched NFT col­lec­tions linked to indi­vid­ual ani­mals on the Dju­ma Game Reserve in South Africa, from where it broad­casts live eight hours a day. Its Wildlife Con­ser­va­tion NFTs promise buy­ers that they can build a per­son­al rela­tion­ship with indi­vid­ual wild ani­mals by receiv­ing spe­cial updates and access to the ani­mals’ sightings.

“You’re not buy­ing a JPEG or a work of art, you’re buy­ing the oppor­tu­ni­ty to feel like the cus­to­di­an of that ani­mal,” says WildEarth CEO Gra­ham Walling­ton. He explains that 40% of the income gen­er­at­ed from the pri­ma­ry sale goes to the cus­to­di­an of the animal’s habi­tat, and that they would get 80% of roy­al­ties on future sales.

Else­where, inde­pen­dent stu­dio and financier Goldfinch recent­ly launched FF3, a plat­form where film­mak­ers can raise crowd­fund­ing and lever­age new tech­nolo­gies like NFTs to help fund their projects.

It recent­ly raised mon­ey for short film The Dead Of Win­ter, with NFTs fea­tur­ing scene stamps, film posters, director’s notes, scripts, the score and exclu­sive com­mu­ni­ty access to direc­tor and pro­duc­er Q&As being used to help fund the film.

Phil McKen­zie, COO of Goldfinch, says NFTs can “bet­ter con­nect” con­tent cre­ators with patrons, investors and fans. He says many crowd­fund­ing plat­forms have not tak­en off because, in the past, in exchange for fund­ing an investor might only receive a DVD or T‑shirt. He adds that investors have been put off from back­ing film projects because the sec­tor is renowned for being murky and opaque.

“But with the tech­nol­o­gy we have now, we can give them a mean­ing­ful own­er­ship of things and prop­er val­ue,” says McKen­zie, who points out that the blockchain tech­nol­o­gy under­pin­ning NFTs allow investors to trade in and out of projects in a trans­par­ent way. “Say some huge direc­tor signed on to help a project, you could use that moment to cash in your posi­tion,” he says. “Some­body else might think it is an amaz­ing time to buy.”

Oth­ers are look­ing at how NFTs could help finance projects. For exam­ple, The Real World cre­ators Bunim/Murray Pro­duc­tions (BMP) and Ani­mo­ca-backed tech ven­ture Vir­tu­al Arts have just part­nered on a new ven­ture, Won­der­fu­el, that aims to use NFTs to fund programming.

Won­der­fu­el will roll out a slate of shows with NFTs “baked into” both the fund­ing mod­el and audi­ence expe­ri­ence. NFTs will be released along­side the shows, in the hope that fans will buy them in order to gain access to rewards, which include involve­ment in cre­ative deci­sions to shar­ing in prizes and fan experiences.

BMP and Vir­tu­al Arts think the sale of NFTs will enable both par­tial and full fund­ing of shows, and get audi­ences involved in cre­at­ing pro­gram­ming that they have a very real stake in.
Whether this takes off in the long-term remains to be seen. But there is lit­tle doubt that, for now, all eyes are on NFTs.



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