Making micropayments in the TV-On-Demand world is becoming commonplace,
but can a model which has its roots in online gaming be adapted for Free-To-Air?
Carl Richter, Co-Founder of Spacecraft TV, talks about "The Cloud".
Last week, British newspapers
were full of the story of the Welshman who lost £4m in Bitcoins by throwing out
his old PC. To read the story in the online editions of The Sun or Financial Times,
though, you'd have had to micropay. As virtual currencies and virtual paywalls
increasingly impact the availability of content, is it possible to imagine anything
other than freefall for Free-To-Air?
Clearly, the micropayment model
can't function on channels where the viewer isn't required to pay. Yet while
the topic's trending, there's nothing stopping the principle being adapted in
pseudo-commercial and innovative ways.
Imagine - just for the 43.5
seconds that it took Monty Python tickets to sell out last week - that a Tweet on a
Free-To-Air platform (Twitter) had a commercial value. Imagine a Tweet was worth
$1. But a non-US dollar in a currency that hadn't been invented yet.
Now let's say there was a TV show
which invented a virtual currency that could scoop up all those Tweets and
monetize them. What would that TV show be?
When we developed this concept we
called it "The Cloud". We thought of the micropayments (Tweets) as
droplets of water. We imagined each droplet of water being scooped up into The
Cloud, monetized, and then raining down.
But The Cloud wasn't really made
of water, or Tweets: it was made of people. In fact it was made of viewers. It
was the collective TV audience, who instead of using Tweets to vote or say
#hello were doing something much more interesting: they were crowdfunding
startup projects by the power of #secondscreen.
Each virtual dollar that was
being Tweeted, by the magic of TV was converted into a real business dollar,
matched in Greenbacks from the investment funds of real entrepreneurs. The
studio had become a kind of Kickstarter, but with broader popularity and a much
shorter attention span.
After Monty Python sold out their
reunion in 43.5 seconds, they added another 4 nights to the bill. Tickets for
these, in turn, sold out within the hour.
This won't take another hour, let
alone four nights to finish. Free-To-Air platforms (TV and Twitter) are in a
kind of freefall, but not in the sense of "rapid uncontrolled decline".
There are clouds and parachutes up there in the sky as well. It just takes a
little creativity and a lot of courage to get up there in the plane and jump.
"The Cloud" format has
been picked up in the US for 2014 tx.
