CDSA

Speaking April 17, during the panel session “Emerging Consumption: Living Movie Experience” at the 2023 edition of CDSA’s Content Protection Summit at NAB (CPS@NAB), Eluvio and Warner Bros Discovery executives spotlighted a first-of-its-kind, Web3-native movie experience created, distributed and sold to fans on the blockchain for a major feature film.

Created for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, the “Living Movie Experience,” announced in October, has been sold as a non-fungible token (NFT).

The interactive, immersive experience allows fans to discover embedded WebXR objects and enjoy images, special audio commentary, along with many hours of exclusive content directly in their media wallets. They also own, on the blockchain, an NFT associated with the experience whose ownership authorises the user to gain exclusive access to all of the content and the full 4K Ultra-High-Definition (UHD) film (with over 20 language localisations) and strong digital rights management (DRM).

Those assets are also served directly from the master source without the use of any traditional Web2 (CDNs, clouds, etc.) components.

“This project, just to say a few words before we kick off, frankly, is one of the most fun that I’ve ever been involved in,” Michelle Munson, CEO and founder of Eluvio, said during the session.

Eluvio and Warner had been “working together for almost a year now on a new concept that allows for basically selling movies in a new form directly on the blockchain,” she said.

“Through the Eluvio Content Fabric, the whole enchilada, from the source through the streaming, the NFT, the authorisation, all the bonus footage, and now … incredible immersive experiences that have WebEx R objects in them, and now have some new generative elements [the project is] really sort of pushing the boundaries of creativity,”

The first Lord of the Rings film was the first movie selected to be released this way, she noted, adding: “This was Warner’s pilot of the concept to see how it would go…. We did this together with Pretty Big Monster, who is a really fantastic creative studio in L.A. who created the immersive experience that’s hosted on the Fabric.”

Eluvio’s Content Fabric is “something different, as a decentralised streaming storage and distribution network that works just in time and tightly binds the trustless end-to-end encryption of the content to the authorisation policy, which in this case is based on NFT ownership,” she explained.

This also “opens up new ways to sell content and offer subscription services,” she said, telling attendees: “Here at NAB, yesterday we had a big event to go over all the technology, and here we’re bringing it out at maturity,” she said, adding: “For the first time you ever discovered … a groundbreaking, first of its kind digital movie” combined with an NFT launch.

Providing a little more background, she said: “This is obviously a new format for releasing catalog footage and could be expanded…. The full-length feature film in 4K is part of this living movie experience. Why is it ‘living’? There are elements in the experience that evolve over time and that takes advantage of some capabilities in the Content Fabric that I’ll talk about. The multi-location, immersive experience is part of the entire bundle, and it is all minted as a … token that the purchasing user owns through their media wallet and experiences, in this case, as a new type of entertainment.”

The authorisation and DRM, “coupled with the end-to-end encryption in this new model is what’s really foundational to the security and was one of the gateways that brought our technology forward for Warner’s selection in this,” she went on to say.

She added: “The most important thing about the user experience is this is really built to the entertainment. So all the things that you think about as typically being issues with crypto and NFTs and this sort of thing are sort of all meant and designed in the background. The most important thing at the top line is that this is distributed entirely, all of the elements, on the Eluvio Content Fabric, which is a full-stack, decentralised content delivery network that also provides the transcoding and the media platform for serving from the source objects to the playable output.”

The application that is “on top of it is a turnkey web app layer that we created that is skinned and customised … for the Lord of the Rings experience,” she said. “And it includes the wallet as a payment and checkout mechanism that drives on-demand venting in the Content Fabric’s Ethereum-based blockchain, and produces the NFTs that then authorise the content play-out and the launch of the experience and all of the elements within that as the user traverses it.”

While today it is only available via a browser, she pointed out: “We’re just starting to get into making it available on TVs” and showing it at NAB.

Mark Nakano, VP of content security at Warner Bros. Discovery, went on to provide more details for the audience.

To view the session, click here.

The 2023 Content Protection Summit was presented by Fortinet and sponsored by Convergent, Signiant, Verimatrix, Eluvio, NAGRA, PDG Consulting and EIDR. The event was produced by MESA, in association with NAB and the Content Delivery and Security Association (CDSA).