Jay Addison Technical and Media Advisor for CryptoBiz Magazine interviews Valerian Bennett. Valerian is a veteran television producer/editor and an award-winning documentary filmmaker with a wealth of experience across the entertainment industry. A Silicon Valley native, Valerian attended the prestigious University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television in Los Angeles where he received his degree in Cinema-Television Production.
Transcript
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foreign we are live in Las Vegas at inside Bitcoins with Valerian Bennett the founder of the protocol dot TV tell us about the protocol.tv excellent well I live and work in Los Angeles as a film and video producer and as I got into Bitcoin it took me I think like most people a little while to to sort of wrap my head around it and I thought to myself that you know if everyday average people have to spend this much time to kind of understand everything that goes on with it you know this is never going to work but I really felt like this technology is is so important and so uh massive and and potentially has the capacity to change so many things in our society I thought well I'm not a programmer I'm not a technical person but I'm a Storyteller that's what I do for for a living so I figured if I could start to go around and tell stories about regular people using this technology to solve real problems um then I would hope that other people can kind of uh intuitively learn about everything that's going on and that would be a good Avenue and for uh for a lot of people that's fantastic now even with the great need for Bitcoin in places like Argentina do you think bitcoin's still too technical for the average person absolutely absolutely yeah it is but you know it's uh it's it's really early in the in the life cycle of things I think uh maybe last year everyone got a little too uh excited with the the price run up um you know everyone kind of quotes this price we were at you know 1200 1100 something like that but if you really look back at it considering all the um the the black hole that mount gox was at the time worry really at 1200 so it's a question of um you know kind of slowing things down letting some of the air and some of the Steam and some of the the hype sort of uh Fade Out well you know at some point find what quote-unquote normal is um but even so as as all that's going on you're seeing a lot of things being built you're seeing a lot of the infrastructure um the railroads if you will the actual things that are going to to move everything along uh that energy hasn't stopped and in fact I think we just heard recently with the the blockchain blockchain.info they just got what like a 30 million dollar investment so incredible the really really smart people with a lot of money are not slowing down on this at all the price may go up the price may go down so it may take a little while but if you're in it for the long haul I think this is a really exciting time it sure is so do you must have more plans on creating more Bitcoin content in the future yeah absolutely and that's what uh we hope the protocol dot TV ultimately will grow into this uh the short documentary that we did uh Bitcoin Buenos Aires so that's kind of what we're considering a feature presentation where it's easily digestible it's something that we hope we can do things like that every few months different uh Bitcoin hot spots around the world and and tell uh the story of of the people who are using Bitcoin in real life at the same time we also want to have more uh consistent content so we've done a lot of interviews with some notables in the industry for example at this conference we had a good sit down with Patrick Byrne from Overstock uh Bobby Lee from BTC China and hopefully we'll start to be able to Output those kinds of things on a weekly basis and ultimately if we're if we're taking it to the the next level we'll have uh daily content where it's a more short form informational news content where it's very bite-sized something you can put on your podcast listen to for three minutes in the morning get the basic idea of what's going on and then go about your day so that's our short medium and long-term plans for new content that's cool now how do you what do you feel the best way for artists to monetize their content with Bitcoin is well with uh with Bitcoin Buenos Aires we we looked at it as an experiment in a lot of different ways so we tried a lot of different monetization techniques just to see what's working what's not working um we initially started with a crowdfunding campaign people could uh join us by paying with their credit card PayPal or of course they could join by Payne and Bitcoin and a lot of people chose to get rewards for that but at the same time we also opened it up that people could anonymously contribute to to our campaign and a lot of people did that we ultimately put uh the finished product on our website the protocol.tv and we gave people the option to pay two dollars in Bitcoin uh pay three dollars if they wanted to use credit card or PayPal just to prove a point about good one third party but we also did a name your own price and put it on BitTorrent with the reality is something like this it's going to be on BitTorrent anyway yeah so we took the initiative to try to include our QR code make sure that all the metadata everything that we could do to create an Avenue for people who could watch it and then pay whatever it is that they wanted to pay and ultimately what we're finding so far is that the average contribution from people who are paying their choosing their own price is actually higher than the for sale price so well I'm curious to see if that's going to be the same with the next thing that we do or if this is a one-off or if it's just a matter of excitement but ultimately I don't think anyone really knows what's going to work that's why we're trying as many different things as possible but the important thing is that we're trying to make use of the technology to allow us to do things that just weren't possible before that makes sense I mean the fact that you can do uh micro payments as an example right yeah and you know we had uh we had a bunch of meetups uh one one fantastic at different places around the world are up to 30 cities right now around the world and just the idea of people watching it and someone's sending you a couple of dollars two dollars through and you can you know of course it's all on the blockchain so you can kind of see it happening in real time and get a sense of uh of the feedback that you're that you're getting so we're just trying to find as as many different ways to use the technology to help create a base for us to continue to create new content very cool the documentary was shorter than a lot of people expected is there plans for a longer version are you moving to on to other things other than that documentary uh there's there's two ways that we're we're going about it one which is we wanted to try this format um just because it's um it's shorter and you can turn it around quicker I think one of the um the pitfalls that I wanted to avoid that I think you've seen in a couple of different projects around the the community that are great projects but they just take so long to produce that by the time they're out that's the whole universe has changed ten times over so this was something we shot um a first week of July we had our first screening kind of a test screening at kryptalina which is a Bitcoin conference in Raleigh that was about six weeks later we did a couple weeks of tweaks and edits and then basically within two months um we had it out to out to the public so I think it's it's important to um to tell these stories in a way that when you see them they still make sense that there's still an excitement about them that they're still fresh hopefully as we get into I guess longer form content that we'll be able to have the resources to make something bigger but make it still make it fast enough that it still feels relevant by the time it it gets what you mean this industry moves so fast yeah that it's it's unlike any other industry right I mean you try and produce content and and you know as you just mentioned I mean everything changes so quickly it's it's hard to you produce a one-hour video and and everything's out of date by the time you're finished editing right and there's uh this next project that we're working on this next sort of feature project that we're working on exactly the same thing where it's like we interviewed these two people who were part of the company and by the time we start editing it they've changed the company name they've changed the focus of the kind it's just things moved so fast and it's that's the excitement but as a filmmaker that's also a challenge yeah so you founded the protocol dot TV what's your long-term hopes for the project well we called it the protocol.tv because I think obviously everyone's concerned about right now Bitcoin because that's just the most popular thing everyone's concerned about the currency because that's the thing that has the most Sizzle But ultimately there's a much bigger picture a much broader picture and it's about using the protocol right so whatever that's going to turn into whether that's the decentralized storage it's the Bitcoin 2.0 it's you know so many other things that people are starting to open bizarre and swarm and as we saw with uh with Patrick Byrne and Overstock this whole decentralized crypto equity there's so many things that if it if it doesn't work it's not going to work just none of it's going to work but that's right it does work it's going to change everything so that's why we try to keep it Broad and and make that our Focus you know what you're doing is very exciting that's for sure let me ask you a question January 1st 2015 what do you think the price of Bitcoin is going to be see I've answered this question once like two weeks ago and I'm already wildly off so we've got guesses that are all over the place so I feel comfortable uh a couple of weeks ago I thought uh 350 it's never going to go Below 350. on the drive here from Los Angeles just saw it run through that and just Barrel South from there um you know as I've as I've actually listened to a lot of the presentations here uh with uh some of the different downward pressures on on bitcoin on the price in terms of Mining and just really the industrial um uh the phenomenon of industrial mining where basically it's a simple cash flow business mine sell that's it yeah so and tell that Dynamic changes it seems like there's going to be just a basic downward pressure too much dilution every day it and and then you add into or getting into the end of the year and there's generally that selling pressure people sort of have their minds go into the holidays and um I don't know other than I mean we've had PayPal Come Aboard we've had this announcement from Overstock so I'm not sure how much more good news is yes on board right yeah and it doesn't really seem to be changing too yeah I mean the PayPal gave us a little bit of a blip but that was it yeah and then right back down the next couple days so giving you a number I was trying to avoid answering the question but you're actually going to make me answer it um I could see around 200 maybe even sub 200 from from there into the beginning of the year and see what happens in 2015. incredible Valerian Bennett founder of the protocol.tv thanks kinda for joining us today excellent thanks for having me I appreciate it this is Jay Addison from crypto Biz magazine live from meckler media's inside Bitcoins conference in Las Vegas remember to subscribe to cryptobiz magazine at cryptobismag.com follow us on Twitter at cryptobismag thanks for joining us and learn more at cryptobizmagazine.com