Blockchain technology is an impressive breakthrough in the field of science and technology. Its popularity has skyrocketed over the years due to its extensive and far-fetched capabilities and promise of making business process smoother, faster, and secure. Smart Contracts and Content Streaming are the new trends that are benefitting immensely by this new age technology. These new facets are toppling established market leaders and creating newer opportunities for new-age start-ups entrepreneurs.
Smart Contracts
Contracts are the most vital part of any business operation and no business can achieve its ultimate objective without following the contractual guidelines. While we have seen traditional contracts been a popular method of framing contracts since ages, Smart Contracts have now pulling everyone’s attention towards it. The reason behind Smart Contracts’ immense popularity is its fascinating features like: It does not take days to build a contract; in fact it does that in minutes. Unlike traditional contracts where escrow, physical presence and lawyers are necessary; Smart Contracts do not require any such things and thus provides a much smoother and faster way to craft a contract. Apart from these, the most interesting feature behind its rising popularity is that it takes only a fraction of the cost to craft the contract as compared to traditional contracts. But at the crux of all, what is making all these things possible. The answer is blockchain technology.
Due to blockchain, Smart Contracts can create airtight agreements bypassing third parties. Many industries are now looking towards Smart Contracts as a mean to lay out business transactions. It has plenty of applications in all sorts of industries ranging from finance, real estate, and logistics to recruitment. In fact, any industry that relies on agreement to function can benefit immensely with Smart Contracts.
These contracts offer transparency and security while simultaneously speeding up the whole business process. While smart contracts have the potential to become legal contracts, they should not be confused with legal contracts accepted by courts. In the near future, we will probably see a fusion of legal contracts and smart contracts as the technology becomes more mature and scalable.
Content Streaming
Streaming content online is the new trend this world is witnessing these days. Whether to watch a movie, song or a famous TV-series, more and more people are using online services. According to one prominent survey, a whopping 61 % of respondents aged between18-29 primarily use online streaming services to watch television. But the current technology consumes large amount of processing power, and make the maintenance of all data, servers and networks significantly costly, thus resulting in to the increased maintenance cost of traditional video-streaming technology. Blockchain technology process large amount of data and charge significantly lesser as compared to the traditional technology for streaming videos. Moreover, this technology provides better content independence, content monetization, and censor-free content distribution.
Independence of Content: The present day content distribution is done through centralized hubs and the power of distribution is left in the hands of centralized corporation. And since the distribution is limited to these hubs, the creators are also limited in contact with the viewer. Although, with the arrival of blockchain technology, content creators can use peer-to-peer distribution channel effectively by removing the centralized hub and can use a system where independent content creators can market and distribute their contents directly to the viewers.
Content Monetization: The traditional centralized method provides creators only paltry ways to earn money with their creative content like: AdSense allows YouTube publishers to earn money from advertisements that are linked to video itself, but this method is not at par with the current times as it strips value from the content itself, effectively reduces the true content creators to taking maximum benefits from advertising revenue. Blockchain technology provides an innovative technique known as tokenizing content for users to monetize their contents directly. Enterprises use tokens through initial coin offerings (ICO), which can be used by creators to promote their content, or by consumers to access and consume content. With tokenizing, blockchain makes it possible for users to choose what to offer while gaining monetary gain directly from the content itself.
Censor-free Content: Today, we have many video sharing platforms, which contain considerable level of censorship and creators are not allowed to produce/distribute their content without following stringent guidelines. Censorship is a requirement of content distribution but not always it is essential. Many times the authorities do the censorship, which is not at all required and impact the revenue of creators and also disappoint the viewers. Blockchain technology uses P2P systems and thus allows for censor-free content distribution and empower both the creators and viewers. It allows creators to promote their content directly to those who want to consume it.
The applications of blockchain technology is immense, this makes it popular. The profound impact of this distributed ledger technology is far greater than anyone can realize. This technology has the potential to change the landscape of economics, business and society at large. We are just at the beginning of its technological adventure.
