How blockchain is changing TV and video streaming

Transcript

GM GM welcome to another episode of web3 Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet don't get caught in the hype cycle I'm jird and I believe that onchain TV streaming is going to change the world that's why I'm carving a path for doers to confidently build and invest in web 3 now in today's era dominated by the attention economy where video streaming has become a UB ious form of content distinguishing oneself in these densely populated digital Waters is a formidable challenge streaming platform azerus however has not only managed to stand out but also

changed the very nature of how we interact with streams azerus is a web3 streaming platform and it has been embraced for its web three wallet feature that layers over their video player and allow streamers and viewers to more directly interact with each other to date azerus has distributed over 2 million worth of rewards to 20 million unique players now today's guest Alex is the co-founder and CEO of azerus which has been dubbed the web three layer for streams Alex is pushing the boundaries of broadcasting blockchain and viewer engagement Alex is no stranger to Innovation having raised millions and successfully exited four

startups in this interview we delve into the mind of a man who believes the future of TV and streaming is not just to be passively watched but to be actively played owned and lived GM Alex welcome to web3 Academy GM GM how you doing thanks I'm doing great how are you great to have you on the show today it's great to be here I read somewhere when I was doing research for this show that when you initially founded azerus in 2018 you use the term streams are not TV I really like that idea that streaming is different than TV and we've gone through this Evolution over the past 40

Years of the way that we consume content as a result of really in the last decade the evolution of streaming I want to start with in your mind you've done so much research and thinking around this and obviously in building azerus how has the last 40 Years of TV sort of played out and where does that bring us to today yeah so so it's kind of interesting because if you look at video content that we watching today it hasn't changed so the experience hasn't changed a lot in since like this even the 70s I would say like we can go way back essentially you're here you watch and you swipe or you CH Channel you

essentially go from one show to another and just watch pass passively and that's really what got a thinking when we started like working on azis in 2018 because like my co-founder and I were like really fascinated by twitch and and twitch is like really pushing it one step further down the road uh than YouTube had so YouTube already like change the game like everybody can create their own content we all creators now it's amazing being able to do it live have an audience and really create that long form live entertainment and just distribute it through the internet that was really changing the dynamic and really what captured my

imagination most was the chat if you look at the chat on Twitch it's phenomenal like people like just drop memes ask out like anything and you can feel that there's there's something burgeoning there like waiting to explode the problem is that you take the chat and you scale that to bigger channels and just doesn't work what happen when you hit like a thousand concr viewers people start moderating the chat slow chat whatever essentially kind of loses its soul and this is interesting because we were seeing this really as an artifact of the future the future is more that and when we thinking and trying to reframe our mind about what's

that going to be what's that future is it a chat the thing that rep popped and got us excited was when we consider Esports and Esports is essentially hundreds of millions of fans watching their favorite teams compete in some of the most exciting matchups that you can watch online and yet this is definitely not a stadium experience I'm a big NBA fan I love going to the stadium I love the stadium experience I think the stadium experience is what makes St like experiencing sports like in the stadium so different than being by yourself on a TV with a beer it's not the same thing

it's about the shouting feeling that everybody's excited everybody like Ying defense or booing um the opponent team trying to get a free throw this is all what makes this experience unique and so we realized but like we can build that this can be at the heart of the streaming experience and really the first thing that we wanted to build is the thing that always gets me excited when I go to in a simple t-shirt toss tissue toss I think is the epitome of what it means to be in a stadium at some point someone walks in has a t-shirt in in his hand walks around the stadium and gets every single person on their feet hands in the air trying to grab that

t-shirt well this is exactly what we did we did essentially t-shirt to on stream so it's it's as simple as that getting people excited getting people to realize that they're not alone that they're competing against everybody else that there's millions of people shouting and making noise because they trying to get that T-shirt and trying to get the attention of the person trying to toss the T-shirt all those things together making creating that Stadium atmosphere for 30 seconds a minutes the time like the duration of a timeout essentially and this is really what what's the core of what we've been buing at others it's a space a platform to build interactive experiences like this one and layer them

on top of any live stream and so obviously live streaming and you mentioned twitch live streaming has it's still pretty much segmented to gaming I mean maybe you can tell me if I'm wrong but it to me it hasn't moved Beyond gaming if we look back is there other examples of interactivity in TV have we ever seen that in the past I'm just before we continue on here I just want to understand that state this is great I love I love that comment because this is something I hear so often I'm going to debunk that that in a second because streaming is actually everywhere and back to interactivity on TV

interactivity has been kind of a wild goose chase since the 80s so in the 80s here in the US there was The Wheel of Fortune and you could play along on TV with the Wheel of Fortune right here okay so for everybody listening Alex has got a board game that he's holding out it's not a board game it's actually no hold on let me then I have to open it now if is you're going to be surprised this is like okay this actually an electronic device that would know what game is running live on TV what are the question and you'll be able to input your own letters and play along just like if you were another contestant and

you could earn money you could earn money so you're literally playing along like the guys on the show on the studio they would make more money than you for sure but there's I think it was like a couple th thousand bucks which for the time was crazy big money for the time for just playing along and having fun and so they think this first iteration you repeat we found repeated artifact of the same ID all over the planet over the next the following 20 30 years goes from like we had the same I'm from France we had like two devices in France that let us play along with all those doing all those TV shows that were broadcasted live if you remember the um mid 2000 there was that whole thing about second

screen and people trying to have a chat on their phone while watching soccer or football on TV there was that of course lots of friction that didn't really play out but what I'm getting at is everybody's looking at this screen saying hey that should be interactive there's so many people doing the same thing at the same time there's just no way we cannot create a connection between all these folks now the big change and and really that's what makes today is so different than yesterday is that that screen that you're watching that content you're watching comes through the internet like for most people even if you if you still have a cable box it goes through internet cable it's an internet cable it has a way back is what I'm getting at so whether you're

watching on YouTube TV over the top you're a code cutter still have your code all those things now this is the internet we there so what you're watching on your stream on your screen is essentially a nature feed broadcasts through the internet and played on an internet video player and this is what changes everything because all of a sudden you're not battling propietary close sours TVs with their we remote but no you you actually everything is working on open internet standards and so that's really what allowed us to to innovate and to build that idea of an overlay that would add interactive

components and buttons over the screen it turns out lucky for us not only is today different than yesterday because internet but also for the past 20 years like the entire broadcast industry has been trying to sell you Pizza on TV I'm not joking I've met someone actually doing that at Comcast in the late 90s so okay selling Pizza on TV is the thing and the entire industry have has built a lot of primitive a lot of Channel a lot of bricks essentially to try and achieve this what we did is essentially look at all that say hey how can we recombine add some level of digital ownership because if I'm going to toss a t-shirt you need to be able to own and get the

T-shirt so essentially digital ownership gamification it's got to be a game it's got to be fun you need to be getting and feeling that this is super massive and everybody's playing at the same time all this SL over the feed so you don't have to take a second screen and you can just play where you're watching where you already are and and this is really what we we launched in 2018 on Twitch because twitch was nice enough to be very forward thinking and build a lot of tools to make it easy to create those type of experiences so we started there and then we uh we expanded and buil our platform one further but yeah twitch was great because they had something called extension they still have it and this is

for me one of those nuggets that someone I don't know the story of extension I'm still looking about it but I think this is most brilliant thing someone had literally the same vision said hey we're going to allow people to put buttons over the screen and we have no idea what they're going to do but it's gonna be F fun and we'll see what happens so we got a lot of weird thing that were playing farts and doing other things on on Twitch but that that's also what allowed us to launch a first sitation of azus in partnership with Ubisoft in Rainbow Six Siege and get everybody who's watching games of Siege to play along and ask hard questions about what just happened

and we had a whole integration so we know some of the hardest question how many bullets were shot people will get it you will be surprised but like that creates like the amount of activity that that generates in the chat people like just trying the luck you could see real time the the various choices being picked by by users it drove millions of people clicking and playing over the years it's it's crazy since 2018 you've distributed over two million in worth of rewards and had over 20 million unique players this initial test on Twitch worked you got great

feedback and now you've built this full platform give us an example of you you kind of teased it a little bit there but give us an example of how somebody would use azerus maybe how a Creator would use azerus and then how a user a viewer would use azerus so we can really clearly understand for those who haven't used the platform before yeah so so it's very hands off for the Creator essentially the creator has to enable to opt into Aus um that gets installed on its Channel and then just runs whenever there's something to run and what runs on his channel is going to be we have quite a few things that can run we have games like attention games prediction

games based on the streams content like the one we have for Rainbow Six Siege we can have playable ads uh so we work with a lot of Brands like cpg brands from the Lo Logitech of this world and other that create essentially campaigns is trivia or different we had a really fun one with with a Flappy Bird you had to like basically essentially go through a maze a branded Maze and the longer you would stay alive the more entry you get for the uh the rewards giveaway so you take all those things and they essentially they show up once in a while we try to tune the experience to make sure it's not intrusive and not we want we don't want this to be in your face all the

time that's not the point we want the experience to be literally like a timeout and timeout more at the beginning of the game than at the end of the game because at the end of the game you endend up having like five time out in one minute so it's like it can go crazy so not that type of timeout we're looking at the one it's like once every like 15 to 30 minutes so it's not overwhelming but whenever it's a good time we know that the game has ended there's a break there's like there's some space that we can feel then we're getting everybody to play and from the end user perspective it's absolutely handsfree meaning that you get on Twitch so twitch is your best most integrated experience so far you get on Twitch when the time is right the wallet loads the game loads you play that's it there's

nothing else if you win if you get more into the other game if you have earned some rewards you can um take ownership of your wallet so we create a wallet for you then you can take ownership of it it's a custodial wallet type in your email we verify it in use and then we can go take you to all the the following steps all the way to go going through kyc and uh sending whatever you have in your wallet into your pro non-custodial wallet so it's all do steps but it all starts with the simplest firsttime user experience which is you're watching and you're already there you're already watching all users there we're not here to acquire folks from out Reddit or something no it's

people who are already watching the game shows up everybody gets it immediately starts playing because you see everybody one everybody else on the Chain playing you see the the bubble has popping all over the place whereever they're interacting to make it clear that everybody is shouting and having fun uh you play along it's one minute a minute and 30 second Max and then sometimes you win and if you win it's a cool prize and we have we have tokens we distribute kind of like a lot of variety of prizes can go from tokens to uh discount codes to our own token to nfts to whatever so essentially we can drop any type of content as a reward and it's really the courtesy of the sponsor sponsoring the activation right wow okay so much to

unpack here so so I just want to start since we're talking about twitch so much can you give us an idea of the size and the scale of twitch like how many viewers do they have how many streamers do they have do you have any idea what those numbers are I just I want people to understand that the amount of there is millions of people that are on Twitch every day watching these live live streams yeah even more than Millions actually I would think you get close to hundreds of millions if not more it's so obvious for me that this is huge uh that I should be more up to date with my numbers uh yes it's it's big for example one of the biggest stream that we've

been active on had 500,000 viewers at the same time concretely watching and all playing on a at the same time so and so those those are big events you have those big programs you have a long tale of graph creators you have everything on Twitch for everyone and it's not just game content so we always like earlier you said streaming is games it's not Saturday like Thursday Night Football on Amazon Prime that streams like this you see there was some soccer at some or on Twitch so everything is being streamed and twitch is a community of folks that are pretty mostly Gamers because that's kind of like what biggest type of content is over there but it's really

it's a community that just watches and integr interacts and connects through the content and this is where I'm getting at the content here it's not the endgame the end game is the people who are watching it and who are together and creating that layer of connection is what changes the nature of the medium and right now you have as you said we have in your example 500,000 people watching the same thing and the only thing I mean if they're watching on Twitch the only thing that's connecting them is the chat that's the only way that they can engage with each other and with 500,000 people I mean there's not even a point in a chat it would just be craziness and you can't actually use it

and then you extend that to T to TV same thing you'd have that problem of okay we've got a whole bunch of people watching at the same time but how do we connect them how do we engage them and that's where as RIS comes in you created a timeout experience a one to one one and a half minute experience that's a game like a trivia game of some kind Everybody Plays and the way I'm understanding it which I love is because I'm already logged in on Twitch I don't have to set up a web 3 wallet I don't have to do anything I can interact in the game right away there's no friction which is obviously so important and such a hurdle for a lot of web 3 projects is

if you start by making people set up a wallet or connect a wallet get out of here you're basically going to lower your conversion rate by half so you make it really simple and then if they win then it takes them to the step of building a wallet and taking the web three steps am I correct that's right spot on right okay okay wow amazing so there's a bunch of things that I want to sort of dive into here first I want to talk about obviously one of the key digital ownership you me mentioned at the beginning blockchain is what enables that aspect of it and you are really using blockchain to create incentives

for the users to play this game or maybe actually I should ask this question first are people playing this game regardless of the incentives do you think they're just playing the game because they're there and it's fun and you've already got my so we actually have proven that that's actually accurate we had like a couple years ago um Ubisoft on the release of Assassin's Creed Valhalla and so they had a eight hour long stream with boss logic doing a Photoshop painting of what revealing the law of the new game so the north mythology and nobody knew it at the same time that was eight hour long with classical music in the background and and so what happened is that we layered on top of it I think it was like 45 maybe 50 trivia question that were

pretty deep into the law of the previous Assassin's Creed and there was one reward and the reward was amazing provided by Ubisoft nobody knew what it was and it took it took us a year to discover actually what the reward was actually going to be so it was pretty interesting experience so essentially you had one reward you need to play for one hour on average to get it we had over 150,000 people play for an average of four hours so clearly Way Beyond they were not grinding for that reward they were just having fun and and for hour is probably like the maximum that any human being can stay on a stream during a weekday it's like we're topping we topping the maximum here so it's it's inherently fun

it gets fun because you really have that sense of community what was amazing with this experience is that it was actually multistream so bosic was in the main Ubisoft Channel and then there were like six or seven other big streamers that were restreaming it and essentially ended up playing for hours with their own Community everybody playing together and trying to look up the answer and helping helping each other wow so it ended up creating that unique really massively multiplayer experience over actually several streams live at the same time I think this was the first that level of interactivity and the and connection that we created around the

content that was inherently was it was going to be a reveal one you Reve that is the nose mology the nose settings the it's a very long content the content was definitely not driving force here that piece of information that will be revealed at some point was but essentially we just say that that was that drove fans and they all had fun for hours playing and quit testing their knowledge and playing together with others this might be a very basic question but when you talk about it like this it sounds so obvious that fans want more experiences want more live experiences

with the the brands or the IP that they love so what is stopping traditional why why is traditional media not doing more experiences like this what's stopping I don't know the NBA from having an interact interactive experience is it just the fact that they're still stuck in their old broadcasting deals and they have to use TV and TV isn't quite ready for this so actually TV is ready for this our experiences work on TV just the same with your remote control everything is always built so that it works but to your question no I think it just takes time there's like a clear inertia here and we're getting there we're having

phenomenal discussion with OTS platforms for Life sports with like a lot of people in the industry it's going to happen it will it happen overnight no and and clearly twitch was the best place to make it happen because it's made by innovators internet first you know all those things kind of like it was still very independent I mean YouTube is part of Google it's like a be it's different like twitch is that island of creativity awkwardness and quickness that only makes these type of experiences possible so this is why we were able to try there first and really move so fast in that space

now everybody else is looking at it and there's been a lot of early try outs in a way D has some early trivia fubo has had some trivia also on alongside some live game it's starting to pick up in my experience what we have been so most of these things don't have digital ownership don't give out rewards the UI is kind of quirky in many ways because they reinvented the whe it's kind of interesting because I think what's fascinating is that there's not many people that understand both both gaming broadcast which is like it's got its own layers of tech and complexity and things that exist that you should not reinvent

if they're already there and blockchain for digital ownership like that integr that intersection there's actually not that many people there I want to say that we probably the one of the very few if not the only one that actually have have all these three expert expertise in house but that that's really what's what's the deal here and all this company they are going to get there and this is what we're building like the way that the vision that we have for us is at long term this is all to which is currently POA we manage it with like this is going to be fully open source fully decentralized and any one of those networks will be just able to run a note plug it into the encoder and be part of the network and all games where smart

contracts just run wherever it's closest and you have access to sponsored games and rewards that can be just out there like available for anyone to pick I have that audience matches this advertisers need I'm going to play the Logitech game and uh and get some some of the rewards to my viewers like all these things this three division we have in order for that space to evolve this has to be an open standard mhm and this is where we're going and it's going to take a minute or two don't expect this to pop up on any screen tomorrow but I definitely hope to be on a Super Bowl at some point yes I love it very very ambitious goal but I'm with you everybody who is

watching the Super Bowl is already interacting in some way with the people they're watching with with their phone with communities so we might as well bring that into a seamless experience it's a great example so we've talked a little bit about the users it's clear to me and I'm I'm sure clear to all of our listeners if you're watching a stream this is super fun you get to engage in a new way you get to play a trivia game and you know what you don't even necessarily need the incentive it's nice to have the incentive that you could win something but it's just fun and I'm already there so I might as well play it's more engaging than a chat right but what about the the Creator or the publisher what's the incentive for them

to integrate azerus is there new revenue streams that are created as a result of this how do they gain from participating so so there's two things first of all is the extra increase engagement as I mentioned like the Assassin's Creed valala example like people just end up staying longer and so more eyeball staying longer translate into more Revenue now you're perfectly right this is also an extra Revenue stream because here what happens is that people engage so when I'm a brand and I'm running a traditional video advertisement essentially like a 30 second that break I have no sense whether how many people paid attention did the message come go

through there's no call to action at best you have an offer code that you can maybe use to get 5% off on you purchase but like I'm I want to see numbers on how often that happens I'm I'm pretty bearish on that one so here what what happens is that it it flips the switch so you take an experience that essentially intrusive that interrupts your fun that forces you to watch something and you cannot Skip and have to wait super boring and now the option the alternative here is that you have a game that game gets everybody to play and haveen together the viewers win something so daytime is valued it's shed

like a piece of the value created by that engagement is shared back straight to them the Creator gets also extra value and that value generated is higher because all of a sudden you can actually measure how many people played I might and only people who pay for people who actually played not for maybe eyeballs there's that many people who actually played the game so they actually spent at least a couple second exposed to the brand reading a question answering the question like having to think about for a second so this has a lot of value and the way that we've built the platform when it comes to supporting sponsors and creators is really inspired by the open economy it's like it's about creating and sharing value in a very open and transparent way and this is like fully blockchain based tokens come in they St

the game is a smart contract every time you start a game there is an allocation of the campaign Budget on it and then when it's over it just gets spread out across the various wet winners creators right holders or whatever there's two types of content that comes through in this overlay I guess is what you would call it right so either it's a game content or it's an advertisers brand content is that yeah that's also a game so all of them are game yeah all of those are games it's always about playing think about it when you're in stadium and there's a tissue toss here there at the chase center it's sponsored

by Ruan it's a Rutan branded t-shirt yeah so and would I care about Rakuten would have paid attention if that wasn't like the T-shirt TOS SP so probably not as much their logo goes around and they have some pretty cool ads with Steph Curry so you know maybe they would they would actually get me there but the the uh but but essentially that creates a connection all of a sudden this is not this is a cool ad I'm fine interacting and I remember it's sponsored by Rakuten because they throwing away t-shirt and it's the loud music and everybody's on their feet and trying to having having fun trying to get one so all do thing TI together you know it's just different experience one experience where you won take take

attention for granted and just like you are here so I'm going to force this on your face as supposed to know I'm going to get you have fun and we're going to have one moment together and we are creating a connection between the brand and the audience that comes from the fact that branding is being generous with the audience and the Creator on Twitch as medium is being generous to his audience so it's really a more positive relationship that creating really trust a mutual respect also because like I'm not again taking your eye your eyeball on that screen for granted I know you may you you can just go to the kitchen and and get a snack or do something else

you choose to be here and to play with us and this is valuable can you talk about the advertisers that you've worked with like can you give us an example of what are the results they are seeing or what are the benefits they're seeing because I imagine this is a completely I mean you you've stated it already it's a completely different way to engage with your audience than the current you know very passive no idea if there if anybody's actually engaging way for sure so we've worked with endemic Advertiser to the gaming space like from Capcom to Ubisoft to war gaming most of those guys and also more like cpg type of folks like for instance like Logitech and

mentioned earlier it's always the same thing we see very high level of Engagement the average is in like in the 60 to 70% on a channel some channels go all the way up to 100% engagement rate so we have channels where everybody who's watching is playing wow I never thought that we actually ever hit 100% that because there's always that one guy but like we know so we are we actually made it so it's very high engagement rate and we have clear call to action that drive direct respon like we are able to track and to provide proof point the people clicked when to check the website when to look for the for the information talk together like all these things are extremely valuable social

proof but also measurable click through so all these things have helped grow Trust on the platform and bring more advertisers this is kind of unique uh if you think about it for the first time you can Target a video based medium on any screen and measure engagement it's huge yeah it's like without having to be nson and have a special device on your screen or something or camera that's checking whether you're watching it's huge it's new and more and more Brands so we now a lot of brands are trying it and it's like everything it's going to take time until it scares and becomes like huge and is all over the

place we've had the opportunity to to help Amazon and twitch running campaign on t7 they also love what they they're seeing so I think it's exciting to see that the entire industry understand that this is an opportunity to change the narrative and to create a new and renew the experience we bring it into what streaming enables as opposed to being stuck in the old ways of airwave TV I mean it makes so much sense one question I have is the prizes that you're giving out to the viewers obviously relies very heavily on blockchain because when you're giving

out one of the issues of pre- blockchain was the only prize you could give out was a physical good you couldn't give digital Goods I mean you could but there's no ownership so it's not nearly as exciting how do you scale your reward system in a sustainable way if you're giving out let's say the azerus token you can't just inflate that token forever and continue to give it out forever are you thinking about the sustainability and scalability of this rewards platform or maybe you don't even need to think about it because the engagement is so strong that the rewards longterm maybe don't matter as much so first taking a step back you can drop any type of reward on others doesn't have to be all kind you could drop if

you an nft collection and you want to drop some nfts you can if you have are making a web stre game and you have items you can drop those so you can literally drop anything the way that the a token works it's you have to think about it really as a as a hard currency so it's not traded essentially we unlock more as we get more dollars coming from campaign so Fiat coming in token allocation being brid to the layer two and token circulating so essentially on store the the value of the items is pretty much back to the dollar so all these things like it's one a is actually half a dollar is that can can kind of

varies from the uh from one provider to another when it comes to the rewards when traditional Advertiser come in and pay uh dollars for running a campaign that gets converted to AA same at 50 50 cents per AA so the a coin is actually a fairly stable currency it's not a stable coin there's got to be legalities and things that I don't want to get into but it's a currency that we use in to to to materialize the value that's being injected by our partners and that we circulate across the ecosystem viewers can take their car still it's an20 token you can hold it today in your wallet it's yours you can send it whatever you want with it or you can use it inside

our store uh we have 35,000 digital items uh from gift cards to any type of game the most recent game and you can most of our users actually spend their coins inside the the store because everybody's a gamer we have the latest game I remember when Harry Potter launched a couple of weeks ago everybody was like on it like when I rep it's like that was the question so yes like everybody was like I'm ready for it because it's great essentially you you're there you're doing something you already do you're watching streams you're having fun with your folks are you earning tokens and you get to play for free almost free Harry Potter today it's released what more do you need no it's so obvious it's amazing and I'm

sure it leads me nicely into my next question I'm sure that's why Anoka Brands was so excited to invest in azerus and so congratulations on the recent acquisition by enoka Brands how do you see this acquisition shaping the future of azerus what's going to happen next what does this enable for you so we have a long-standing relationship with Animo actually part they were part of our early preed round back in 2018 so it's been a a long relationship and you know I I think there's a few things I don't want to speak on their behalf but what I'm really excited about is how we going to be helping all these web stre company building web stre games and web

stre experiences connect with a wide audience and this is something that we can really bring to the market I think that's something that we got the folks at Anoka excited having essentially a beitch head on streaming access to million eyeballs when cool game Games come out this is a great place to educate to drop items and to engage players to try and come and uh and try the game and also you know it's a longer term Vision we essentially if you think about it we're Reinventing the way that a traditional medium that has that's growing like billions of dollars

per year is functioning so if if you project yourself in a couple years from now now and what is TV going to be I think there's going to be a high level of gamification maybe there be a store with a bunch of games that you can play Maybe draftking will have there and I'm just speculating so like like maybe draftking will do a prediction game right there running on azerus over the Super Bowl and like all these things could be possible and maybe you don't want to wage your money just want to uh play with your favorite brand like I don't know Doritos we actually had some really cool story with them oh really so all those things can come together and what I'm getting at is it's a new gaming

universe that doesn't exist there and that can be as large as the amount of screen that we have in our lives I think it is exciting and this only exists because of gamification blockchain and broadcast can you tell us the Dorito story actually is there a story there that you can share not right now I'll tell you in private okay I'll get you we'll get you back for that we we had a cool prototype so it's like I I can't talk about this one for that was a really cool idea that that the agency will work had so it's okay awesome I wonder if the agency is Vayner 3 we've had them on the show

before too and I think that they represent Toritos I'm not 100% sure I think these brands from what I understand now have hundreds of agencies it's true true yeah it's true one of the things just when we talk about emerging Trends one of the trends that I've seen coming out of China is the shoppable streams that's happening can you talk about a little bit about that people not in China probably haven't experienced that yet but it makes a ton of sense is that connecting to the vision for azos as well in a way yes so shop stream essentially key opinion leaders talking about the product and there's an overlay there's a layout there not usually is not an overlay it's around the screen there's an easy way to see the product

that they're talking about and with one click uh essentially add it to your C and by now so today shopable ads are usually not over the screen they around the screen it's starting to pick up in the US it's kind of the the new Next Generation QVC if you think about it and it's definitely fascinating so there is an intersection but there's also a strong difference essentially shop shopable streams are still usually very solo CU single player uh it's not about creating it's not like a live multiplayer experience and I've not seen that being the case that said shopable making things shopable make a ton of sense and this is definitely something that can be built just the same on

others because you can think about it there the same Foundation we are able to show details get clicks there's a wallet you can pay right there everything is already ready to to build shopping the angle though is is slightly there's a strong difference I think if you are going to be making a like a QVC NE gen around shable streams it's its own thing so you are definitely going to be using the entire real estate around the screen to to show how as many details it's about like making that one click purchase with delivering everything there's clearly a few things that you want to optimize BR which have not yet been our Focus but can you build chable

ads on TV on azus yes 100% super easy am I a strong believer on buying Pizza on TV during a 30 second break not as much because I always feel like and this is really a difference of nature of the product sh streams you're going to be watching that guy talk about this product for 20 minutes maybe 15 so you have an ample time to think about it to make oh this looks really cool okay like it's a longterm process every time I see a shable ad which is like more like a minute 30 seconds I'm like I don't want to be pushed into making a decision now

it doesn't do it for me and maybe and I feel like that's it's not the right time it's the right time to create a connection to get people awareness to understand to get them engaged to get them to recognize the brand and to to create some kind of affinity it's not when you want to take their money that not the right time in my opinion in the user Journey yeah well and in shoppable streams it's it's basically just taking infomercials which are designed to teach you about a product and then just putting it over top of a influencer or k who's talking about that product currently and then saying hey we're just going to make it really easy for you to

One Click by whereas what you're talking about is engaging users in a fun experience that has nothing to do with forcing them to buy something or to try to direct them to a purchase you're just engaging them in a new way while they're already there yeah and in in the shop streams the KO the C leader it's he's actually selling like actively selling while so if you think about it the content the video content itself is very much GE towards the purpose of creating being a top ofel towards toward monetizing toward selling which is not what we run on our our thesis has always

been that TV has great content we don't want to change the content I want the Super Bowl to still be a Super Bowl I want the the the NBA to be the same the TV show I'm watching I want them to have the same Pace I don't want them to change because theum is evolving what I want is to have a movie theater like Stadium experience and connect people who are doing the same thing at the same time and leading the same experience it's not about changing the content and there's a few companies like that over the past couple years who've tried to create more like a Hunger Games type of experience where you'll be watching and changing what's going on some games uh

have actually been built around that the tees I think project dwin if I recall I was like four or five years ago was doing that so you if you're streaming it you would allow enable essentially viewers to kind of like in Impact right my my understanding of these experiences is that they did not pan out as as well as the movie because the reality is that creators who are here who are making a show and and trying to win trying to show the best game don't want the the distraction and when you have like 100,000 people and one action who's retaking it it's not the idea like The Hunger Games vision and the way that

they share the story is definitely super appealing I think there got there is something there they haven't seen it implemented in a way that carries and that Tre gets both the uh the players and the viewers as engaged as they are during the games yeah yeah it's very true and I I I don't remember what the show was but there was a there was a movie on Netflix that I remember watching where you could interact with the movie and you know that the main character makes this decision instead of that decision it was novel but it wasn't repeatable well you know that's actually super interesting Netflix band a snatch and we can go way back you'll have to stop me at some point because we we are never ending this conversation at this B

but the the but what's phenomenal about band snatch is that first I love the experience it's one of the Black Mirror that's right series and the problem is that it's not that it's not repeatable it's extremely expensive to make because you have to shoot literally like three or four times more content than you would for a regular episode and viewers only end up playing literally One path but I found it you know it's another artifact of the future it's showing what can be done and that was working and really what's interesting here it's working on any screen was working on your phone was working on your TV was working everywhere you have Netflix you could play this game and just shows like

it's streams on a TV one more time it's not you could not do that in your black and white C in the 80s and so we're at a unique point this blockchain is ready for us to enable digital ownership the hardware is ready to stream across any platform and then the creators are creating and building communities in ways that not they weren't before and it's interesting that the content doesn't need to change we just need as to come in here and provide this new engagement mechanism to have fun and to change the way that we interact with advertisers to change the way that we win prizes to change the way that we build community online I mean the impact

is far reaching right and and from my perspective we're just stretching the surface I mean we build the infrastructure to do that but I really hope that some crazy kid we come up with this with an idea that doesn't make sense for me but we engage millions and that's like Roblox Style you know like when you play a Roblox game you're like I have no idea what's going on why but like it's working and this is that new generation that this this the developers that going to be creative and really understand what people want to do what makes sense for them what fits into their culture to create those connection at SK leveraging on the ability that we have brought to this

screen it's an exciting time very exciting excited to continue to watch azusa's Journey before we wrap up here uh because we could keep going forever but we're going to have to wrap at some point I want to give you a chance to give a shill to our audience where can they find you online how can they get involved in asress check out my Twitter it's Z monkey zaty y pretty much that monkey on every social so on Discord as well so check us out we have a full documentation on azerus about our ISD and everything if you have ideas we have grants and essentially always happy to to help to connect with the rest of the community if you have a cool game that you think

more people should be playing but show us what you're building and we'll uh we'll figure out how we can help you it's as simple as that so it's really like it's an open platform we're happy to have and to uh give you a visibility on the network and to contribute to the ecosystem at large wonderful okay just a couple speed round some fun personal questions before we wrap up here what's an n ft you'll never sell oh clearly this guy I show you if you can see it this is my uh Yuga Labs ape yeah so I got this guy I probably overpaid back then because went going down he's coming back up so I'm like hopefully I make it back but it's naturally overpay when you think of the value of that Community

it's not so much about the nft about the fact that whenever you find you meet all Apes there's an instant connection it's really like you go to AP Fest it's Yuga has buil something special and it's not about the jpeg it's about being part of that community and it's probably one of the strongest artifact of what's happening in web stream it's it's interesting that you bring up Yuga because one thing that I've always said is a lot of people it's very easy to look at it and say oh well how do you know that a JPEG is worth $20,000 right you don't know that but if you can can tell me that you can spend $20,000 now and get a lifetime pass to

one of the best digital communities in the world of creators and leaders that's actually an incredible price and you're going to get access to an annual event ape Fest wherever that might be you think about that the cost actually is much less than what typically you would have to pay to get access to a community like that yeah 100% with you the thing is like a lot of communities lot of connections made that same promise but actually you got delivered right yeah so it's like if if you look at my metam mask like you find some Weir Panda and stuff that did not plan out the way go no and so it's very hard because at the end of the day it's really on the long

run that you can judge whether something some this community has value or not and clearly youa has proven that they they have consistently been able to deliver great great social experiences and great value for for holders and when I'm saying value it's not monetary value it's social value which is I think a lot more important yeah definitely if you had a billboard that one billion people were going to see what would you write on it h oh man that's a good one I mean the first thing that PO would be a wag me would be what sorry wag me wag me I kind of like the spirit here we all going to make it and it's just about making sure that like we we get that together so I think I think actually WR

a jant wag me on it I love it I love it you know what surprisingly I don't think any guest has ever said wag me we've done hundreds of podcasts and you might be the first one maybe got overused and people don't like it as much but I've always felt it is such a great it extends Beyond crypto Beyond blockchain to just a general belief we're all in this together we're all going to make it together and and beyond that I always remember something that that yet told me one day it's like he said it's still so early there's no competition we all building together so it's all about figing out it's not it doesn't matter chain a b c it doesn't

matter even if you have like three people doing the same thing there's enough room like literally we are the infancy of this space we should all be building together and everyone's success is is everybody's success and so it's really we are all going to make it together well on that note thank you so much for joining us today Alex absolute pleasure to have you on the show thank you so much for having me was been it's been great thanks for listening in everybody have a great day thank you for listening to web through Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet if you enjoyed this episode please share it and subscribe or follow so that you don't miss the next one while you're at it there's a link in the description for our free newsletter where we provide

timely and relevant web insights so you can confidently build and invest in web 3 make sure to subscribe today one final note this podcast is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice crypto and web3 are risky and you should never invest more than you're willing to lose thank you friends and see you in the next one