The World Poker Tour (WPT) announced on Tuesday that it has entered into a partnership with BitMovio to have the video streaming service broadcast WPT Seasons XII and XIII. Those are not the current and/or future seasons; they were contested 2013 to 2015.
Of course, you very well may be asking yourself, “What is BitMovio?” Well, get ready to read a wall of jargon that will make absolutely no sense if you are more than 35-years old:
BitMovio is a next-generation gamified video entertainment marketplace enabled by blockchain technology that connects forward-thinking content creators and owners with passionate consumers and which is focused, in particular, on millennial and Gen Z audiences. BitMovio’s decentralized streaming platform enables content creators/owners, consumers, and financiers to transparently, and instantaneously, exchange value and attention. Backed by top-tier venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, New York, and Boston, BitMovio is on a mission to disrupt the video entertainment industry’s centralized content distribution and financing model.
I mean, seriously, that sounds like someone found every corporate and 2019 techie cliché and jammed them together into a garbled pile of pseudo-intellectual claptrap. “Exchange value and attention?”
In all seriousness, BitMovio looks interesting, though it has an enormous hill to climb to become a video streaming service that anybody is going to watch over competitors like Twitch, YouTube, or Netflix. I’m not extremely well versed on the technologies presented, but BitMovio appears to be trying to shift control of content from distributors of said content to the creators and is doing so through a decentralized network. BitMovio says it is using a “hybrid structure,” combining cloud storage with a mesh streaming network to achieve “optimum balance of availability, performance and security.”
One thing BitMovio touts is transparent payment and reporting for the content creators; as soon as a viewer pays for programming, the creator sees the money. To this point, BitMovio has also created its own cyber-currency called MoviBits for incentivization. BitCoin and Ether are also accepted as payment methods. Viewers can even share their home bandwidth with the platform to earn crypto tokens.
BitMovio only launched last week on February 14th, so at the moment, content is very limited. Scrolling through the Android app, there are some independent-looking films, home-made short films, a bunch of old sci-fi movies from the 1950’s and 1960’s, and some streamers, though no streamers were live when I looked. Some content is free, while other content requires payment. One nice thing – if this takes off – is that customers do not need to pay a subscription. Everything is a la carte.
The World Poker Tour will instantly be the most recognizable brand on the platform.
“The video streaming industry continues to grow in prominence and the World Poker Tour is proud to air its television show on BitMovio, a new industry force,” said Adam Pliska, CEO of the World Poker Tour, in a press release. “We are thrilled to enable BitMovio viewers the opportunity to enjoy episodes of the World Poker Tour from wherever they may reside across the globe.”
