Imagine if 30 years ago you were allowed to invest on Internet. I don´t mean on an internet company, such as Amazon… what if you were allowed to invest on Internet itself, and now you would be earning a fee of every digital interaction in the network? That is exactly what is happening today with blockchain protocols: everybody in this space is super excited about the chances of investing on the underlying layers of the internet of value.
What we are developing in Flixxo can be seen as just an App, but that would be a mistake. On one hand a decentralized video distribution platform has the potential of reaching millions of users, to bring a critical-mass, a broad base of consumers who will interact on top of the protocols that are being built. But on the other hand new communication and data distribution protocols have to be developed in order to make it work.
Flixxo relies on Bittorrent protocol, which has been developed 16 years ago by Bram Cohen. As you can easily picture, and even though Bittorrent is yet the most popular file distribution protocol — more than 250M users — the way we used to communicate in 2001 is totally different than the interactions we have today. Smart phones were around only for the last ten years and Bluetooth has became an IEEE standard in 2002. YouTube exists since 2005 and Whatsapp was created in 2009.
There are many distributed or decentralized cloud storage solutions being developed nowadays, but as they don´t give the correct incentives for final users to become a “node” they will probably lean on a few users lending a lot of storage space. They are paying around 9usd per Tb/month… so there is no way a user would lend just a couple of gigabytes to the network. These companies are building infrastructure for data storage. Flixxo will develop protocols for decentralized bandwidth. Imagine having 5 million users sharing 1Gb instead of having 5,000 users sharing 1Tb, both networks are sharing 5 Petabytes of data. But the availability of information, and the speed in which that information is retrieved is much faster on the first one.
By 2020 82% of internet consumer traffic will be video. Flixxo will be the largest network and the protocol for a compelling distribution of data in the new internet of value.
