Dealmaking, made clear.

How the ‘business’ of entertainment is primed for disruption — and why it’s a perfect use case for blockchain.

In entertainment, content is king. But you’d never know based on how it’s managed. Streamers and studios spend north of $200B on content, up 14% year over year.[1][2] But despite its status as entertainment’s most valuable asset class, how we transact intellectual property is nothing short of byzantine.

Here’s how it works today. Take a look at the lifecycle of a project — say, your favorite streaming series.

This is a vastly simplified depiction of 'how things get made' in Hollywood. Not pictured: The unpredictable number of stops, starts, and dealmakers at each step.

At each step of this process, new parties — the ~1M IP creators, screenwriters, managers, agents, producers, studios, and lawyers of all shapes and stripes — enter and exit, working toward the same goal: Let’s get this series made — and ourselves (but most importantly, myself) paid.

These parties don’t always trust one another, and they share information sparingly and inconsistently — even basic elements such as ownership confirmation on the IP rights being transacted. This makes negotiating and executing deals (at each step, there’s a contract to be drafted and signed, and sometimes many) painfully inefficient and absent of economies of scale.

Did we mention that everything’s done over email, from exchanging property, to checking “who’s holding the ball” in a deal negotiation, to issuing payment notifications? And confirming provenance? With no impartial records repository in entertainment, the only definitive answers are obtained through litigation.

No wonder it takes close to 3 years[3] to get a project sold in Hollywood, frustrating dealmakers across the value chain (a whopping 100% of those we surveyed).

This can no longer be viewed as a tolerated quirk of the industry. With market demand for entertainment content at new highs, discarding the status quo is more urgent than ever before.

Entertainment dealmaking is a perfect use case for blockchain. It’s thanks to blockchain’s core element of trustlessness.

Google blockchain and you’ll see the term trustless everywhere. What does it mean? And what’s the connection to answering our workflow woes?

Being trustless is a positive. In a trustless transaction, dealmakers don’t need to trust (or even know!) one another for the transaction to clear. No single entity or individual “owns” the system, and all data is distributed across many, many “blocks”, minimizing the risk of hacks.

Here are five ways in which the entertainment industry benefits.

• Clearer workflows. Confusion around a project’s status, history and outstanding actions is eliminated, no matter how complex the deal or deal team involved. In an on-chain world, “who’s holding the ball” is no longer a mystery.

• Speedier dealmaking. Once a project has been added to the blockchain ledger, chain-of-title verification — the labor-intensive process of ensuring “clean” provenance that’s required before an option or acquisition deal closes — becomes instant and automated.

• Fewer disputes. Transaction activity recorded on the blockchain ledger is immutable and transparent, removing the question of a project’s ownership, and reducing the risk of related errors and omissions and the need for its mitigation through E&O insurance.

• Automated payouts. Blockchain replaces manual invoicing and payouts (and corresponding human error) with smart contracts, straightforward “if x, then y” codes that self-execute when their conditions are met.

• More efficient markets. Blockchain-”tokenized” IP improves the precision, speed and cost associated with project underwriting, making it easier for dealmakers to access production financing, and in turn, address market demand for more content making it to the screen.

TL;DR: Blockchain provides a single source of truth for entertainment dealmakers, enabling workflow clarity, speedier dealmaking, fewer disputes, automated payouts, and more efficient markets. It’s powered by blockchain’s ability to automate rules-based behavior in a trustless environment.

Storyline: Dealmaking, made clear. We’re working to revolutionize the business of entertainment with blockchain.

It begins with Storyline, which will manage workflow activity from a deal’s inception to acquisition, powering the change that the entertainment industry so sorely needs.

Currently in development on the Provenance blockchain, Storyline pilots this April in select producer-rep-writer ecosystems. We’re looking forward to discussing our platform capabilities, pilot outcomes, and why we selected Provenance as our core blockchain technology in our upcoming posts.

Want to chat about what we’re up to? Talk to us at our brand-new handle, @followstoryline.

Note: Survey outcomes based on 74 responses from individual interviews and focus group sessions with experienced writers, agents, producers, entertainment lawyers, and studio executives.

Megh Duwadi is CEO and co-founder of Storyline, the team working to revolutionize the business of entertainment with blockchain.

This piece was originally published on Mirror.