Website | Whitepaper | ANN | Telegram |
By: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2230830

Slate is taking the entertainment industry to the next level. So far, the best the entertainment industry has to offer it customers is subscription based memberships. These memberships allow people to watch movies and tv-shows whenever they choose. Now Slate is creating the Binge platform to further improve the entertainment industry. Binge is creating a streaming platform on the blockchain. So why exactly do we need a blockchain based streaming platform, and how will it be beneficial? These are the two primary questions this article will focus on and try to answer.

Well, Slate is creating Binge as a competitor to Netflix and other firms that offer subscription videos on demand (SVOD). That basically means people get to pay for a monthly or annual subscription fee and in exchange Netflix and other firms like Netflix provide their members with a streaming service of tv-shows and movies from all different kinds of genres.

The Problem

The problem with firms like Netflix is that these companies are basically giants in the streaming industry. They are consistently acquiring new content and are getting exclusive content made for them. All this content requires a lot storage capacity to store, and to make matters worse it requires an extremely high bandwidth for firms like Netflix to be able to stream all the content they have worldwide. Since all the traditional streaming firms are all decentralized the entire task of storage and managing the bandwidth comes down on their servers alone. Which makes it very costly for these firms to run their operations.

As mentioned earlier in this article firms like Netflix and Amazon are huge and they continue to grow larger everyday. Not only are these firms acquiring more television content they are also acquiring more and more of the entertainment industry market share. These firms are turning into oligopolies and completely dominating the market. A basic rule of economics is that the fewer number of firms in a certain industry the worse that industry will eventually perform.

The Solution

So how could Slate stand a chance against the existing firms in the video on demand industry if they have already grown so big and powerful? Simply put its because Slate has a solution to the problem current firms in the VOD industry have. As mentioned earlier in this article, current firms in the VOD industry like Netflix have large amounts of content and they keep buying more. The cost to store and provide bandwidth for all this content on a decentralized server costs a fortune. On the other hand, the Binge platform will be is going to use the decentralized Slate blockchain to host all their content and provide bandwidth for it. This will make operation costs much cheaper for Slate and will thus allow them to make subscription costs cheaper for their customers.

Slight Hinderance

So far Binge is going to be exclusively available to people who have the Slate cryptocurrency, called the SLX token. If a user wants to buy the Binge platform’s streaming services he or she will have to pay Slate a fixed monthly subscription fee in SLX tokens, because for now Slate does not accept any other cryptocurrency as an accepted form of payment.