A new challenge to the traditional models of entertainment financing was launched on Monday by MovieCoin, in partnership with fintech tokenizing group BANKEX, giving investors the chance to own a stake in Hollywood films and TV shows.
MovieCoin, an entertainment industry financing platform based on blockchain technology, aims to use tokens that will increase stakeholder transparency and significantly improve industry accounting and payment practices.
The platform plans to issue a Fund token to raise capital that will be invested in movies, television programs and other entertainment industry assets. Each Fund token will represent an ownership interest in the projects financed.
MovieCoin said these tokens will offer infinite divisibility and enhanced liquidity when compared to existing industry investment vehicles. Fund tokens will only be sold to accredited investors under Regulation D and to non-US persons under Regulation S of the United States Securities Exchange Act.
The MovieCoin financing platform will tokenize the films and television programs the Company plans to finance, using BANKEX’s Proof-of-Asset Protocol, smart contracts and smart asset assembly. According to a statement, the platform will provide financiers and other institutions with an immutable, transparent ledger of all of the expenditure, receipts, entitlements and ownership of each project the Company finances.
In addition to the Fund token, the Company is also issuing another called Moviecoin that will enable consumers to purchase cinema tickets, buy or rent films or TV programs on DVD and Blu-ray. Consumers can also purchase video on demand (VOD) services and subscribe to programming offered by other VOD, and pay television providers.
All payments made in Moviecoin will be recorded on the blockchain and distributed to each project’s lenders, investors, distributors, guilds and profit participants, bypassing the bottlenecks and middlemen in Hollywood accounting systems. MovieCoin said its platform and token will provide all of a project’s financial participants with an end-to-end view of the financing, distribution and exploitation of that project, from acquisition through every window in which consumers buy, rent or subscribe to view content.
“The ability to invest in the USD 2 trillion-a-year global entertainment industry has traditionally been off-limits to all but a handful of banks and privileged insiders,” said Christopher Woodrow, Chairman and CEO at MovieCoin – and producer of movies like Hackensaw Ridge and Birdman – in a statement. “Our platform and token are game changers in that they will radically transform the ways in which motion pictures, television programs and other media projects are funded.”
“The increase in transparency introduced by the platform makes the tokenized asset clear and understandable to institutional investors and the professional finance community,” said Igor Khmel, Founder and CEO at BANKEX. “It represents the first commercial case of real asset tokenization, globally and in the US, and is one of the clearest examples of how best-in-class technology and innovative thinking is being combined to completely reshape a hardened industry sector like film production with the help of blockchain technology and the digital asset economy.”