Digitalization has helped the media sector in many ways. The traditional systems and concepts are now being disrupted by innovative approaches that involve advanced technological usage. With the new-age digital approach, things get done faster, better and in a much easier way. 

If we take media into context, the issues that many musicians, writers, and even photographers face, all revolve around the idea of not being able to protect the ownership of their content, this makes monetization difficult on a digital platform. 

Blockchain has solutions for all these issues and Mediachain is one such platform that is utilizing the blockchain to allow digital creators to attach information to their creative works, a timestamp that data to the bitcoin blockchain and store it with the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), a distributed file system incorporating aspects of blockchain technology.

To Jesse Walden and Denis Nazarov, co-founders of Mine, the startup behind the Mediachain project

Mediachain will primarily focus on using machine learning and blockchain tech to make users avail the services that allow them to attach information to files. They can even reverse query files to search for creators.

At launch, Denis Nazarov, one of the co-founders of Mine, the startup hat developed the Mediachain project said, “With drag and drop and copy and paste, images are the easiest media type to share on the Internet. Images travel virally, but it’s hard for the creators and content owners to benefit. We see Mediachain as a global rights database for images.”

Jesse Walden, the other co-founder and Nazarov both believe that public institutions that provide open data sets for images used in galleries, libraries and archives could help them make their platform gain better and wider use.  

“Part of their public mandate is to have openly licensed metadata about their works. The Metropolitan Museum of Art might have its metadata platform, it might have an API and there are lots of interesting projects being built on top of them,” Nazarov said.

Mediachain though is a great concept and approach to help deal with the ownership of content, it still has to face challenges when it comes to people or we might as well say actors who would want to claim others work as their own.

Walden and Nazarov believe that engaging public institutions would help build the foundation of trust among the users. The Mine team is trying to develop a platform where the users will have the liberty of interpreting and explaining images but at the same time use a system that is reputed so that the information that the platform gains the trust of the users.

The Mine team believes Mediachain could be incorporated into existing popular social media platforms.

The founders even mentioned that these new media companies like Tumblr would allow users to search for images using its API (even the ones altered by subsequent creators). Tumblr would be able better monetize with the help of the upgraded analytics.

“As soon as the content hits Tumblr, they lose all analytics. An incentive is you get cross-platform analytics and we think that is a compelling incentive for larger platforms,” Nazarov said.

Mediachain is still a bit concerned about the use of new, advanced technology might result in slow-paced efforts. This concern is because IPFS has been described as a “bleeding-edge” technology, and the ability that it carries to make advancements on development goals, they fear, might cause some trouble for their roadmap.

Still, the platform is requesting developers to help them overcome these challenges.