Eluvio Content Fabric continues to advance as Eluvio seeks to provide video content creators with a way to distribute video to customers without CDNs, cloud stacks, transcoding, or databases. Michelle Munson, CEO/Founder, Eluviodiscussed the latest developments in Content Fabric, NFTs, Web 3.0 and more with SVG at NAB 2022 last month.
Eluvio’s Michelle Munson: “All we’re involved with is just unlocking the way you can tokenize videos.”
There is a lot of discussion about technologies like Blockchain, Web 3.0, NFTs. How do you rate the latest developments?
There is an acceleration in the development of the internet and we have been very fortunate that the Eluvio Content Fabric as a blockchain is expanding both in its capabilities and in its use in the ecosystem where all these experiences and content are created and then tokenized, has further developed. Now, third-party developers are building these frontend experiences alongside node providers, and we’re at the point where we’re contributing, both in terms of backend validation and the deployment of nodes in the network.
For example, Eluvio provides some of the core blockchain protocols for the media application layer. We are involved in the WWE Moonsault [official marketplace for NFTs]and that leveraged a lot of the functionality in our fabric kit and what we built in the API stack.
It’s all pretty mature and we’re getting some creative things going to create a multi-dimensional NFT experience.
There seems to be a lot of discussion around the Metaverse and Web 3.0. What do you think that experience will look like and how will it change the experience with content?
I think Web 3.0 is a much broader concept than the Metaverse itself, which I see as a specific type of new content experience. For example, Microsoft did a launch of Windows 11, which was an AR60 concert with an NFT dip in the experience. It was the first of its kind and super successful, with 120,000 NFTs minted over a week and 52,000 wallets. This is a retail metaverse that enables augmented reality experiences that stream on our platform.
When you combine Unity Pixel streaming technology [that allows developers to stream rendered frames and audio from a remote-GPU-enabled computer] You can create retail offerings using NFTs as ownership and incentives for achieving certain levels of knowledge or participation. As the customer progresses through the shopping experience, they discover new things that sponsors make for you and even interact with them, such as: B. unlocking a room that you can only access with certain tokens.
Owning NFT can gamify knowledge to some extent. I think interplay is one of the experiences that we are involved in that I think is very interesting and production is there to do something like that because the content fabric supports interactivity and ownership by providing an embedded wallet experience. And last are avatars that can be linked to an identity, and a blockchain address is a great way to do that.
Let’s discuss a project you’ve been working on, Dollyverse for Dolly Parton, that might help people understand how this all might work.
We sponsored the live streaming concert and an album NFT drop for Dolly Parton, which was the premium event at SXSW in Austin. It was a four-hour live Austin City Limits show that Dolly published her book on Run, Rose, run and the accompanying album. And the album dropped into the Eluvio wallets as an NFT. It was also a great test of that ad hoc environment because people created their own wallets and claimed their free NFT of the album when it hit theaters. It was tremendous. Almost half of that was in 4K, and input went straight to the Fabric from Austin City Limits with no intermediaries. We effectively included it in the Fabric and people were able to rewatch it via a Rewatch NFT that was minted and approved in the marketplace. And the dynamic capabilities of the fabric allow an existing wallet NFT to be updated.
With Web 3.0, the possibilities are wide at the moment and all kinds of experiments are being carried out. It ranges from the more classic collecting experience to this type of experiential media ownership. But the common thread is fandom.
What was Dolly’s reaction?
That’s why I was invited to speak in Nashville, I find music interesting: it’s more aloof on the internet because the industry has been through so much. I also think the music urgently needs to come out from under the intermediate platform to increase profitability. So I think this group has the highest motivation of all.
Does this future require wearing a VR headset and an avatar of yourself?
In our case, most experiences created with this tokenization are traditional fan experiences where they clearly weren’t wearing glasses. It uses entertainment as well as your Eluvio Media wallet. But on the pure Metaverse side, the possibilities are wide open in terms of design and experience. That’s part of the challenge: making it fun and engaging for people in a whole new way. For example, you may have a traditional TV show that can create a whole new following, which is basically an online discord threat that exists because someone created a gamified gathering experience.
And is video a big part of that future?
All we are involved with is just unlocking the way you can tokenize videos. I think the possibilities are endless and the right strings are being pulled right now. This is my only plug for our Content Fabric protocol, as it allows a representation to be owned by a specific user, but basic content rights are still enforceable by the copyright owner. That’s not possible in any other form, and it’s what everyone wants to do: get maximum trading from that representation without compromising underlying ownership.
