Blockchain and Media: An Important Combination for Athens Technology Center (ATC)

Media is one of ATC’s engagement sectors. ATC has been a pioneer in providing tools for journalists and media agencies. The participation in the Bloomen project allowed ATC to expand its portfolio of offered services in the area of copyright management.

This article summarises outcomes of the Bloomen project from the perspective of the company:

In addition work in the project enhanced its knowledge on the design of the appropriate tools with the use of Blockchain technology through the development of the Bloomen platform and the collaboration with the Bloomen consortium. During the Bloomen project, Blockchain technology was extensively analysed, evaluated and used, which enhanced ATC’s relevant expertise.

Results from Bloomen

A series of articles about the outcomes of the Bloomen Research Project. More articles

Bloomen and Blockchain

Bloomen extended the use of Blockchain technology to handle different online user transactions, providing an innovative way of content creation, sharing, personalized consumption, monetization and copyrighting based on Blockchain technologies.

Bloomen and ATC

ATC, in collaboration with the rest of the consortium, developed the Bloomen web platform. The use of the platform by the fully functional Bloomen use cases signals, at first sight, that the platform’s goals have been successfully achieved. 

The long-term success of the platform is expected to be proven by the integration of third party pilots, since the real vision of the Bloomen platform is to help the Blockchain community evolve in an efficient way and facilitate the development of new ideas and business models in the scope of Copyright Management. 

However, the most important project output for ATC is Bloomen Photo, an application developed in close collaboration with DW.

Bloomen Photo

  • Bloomen Photo is based on user needs of photo editors and the related process requirements in news media companies. Photo editors often look for specific pictures they cannot easily obtain through news agencies or stock photo platforms.
  • Bloomen Photo is now a user-tested demonstrator. It enables a more direct, fair and efficient approach to acquire specific news photos from external photographers and to deal with related rights management.
  • Bloomen Photo offers a much higher transparency of photo rights for media companies across all steps of the workflow. It also provides the tools to manage compensation for the creators, based on “smart contracts” and in a fair and easy way.

Blockchain

In summary, involvement of ATC in the Bloomen project showed that Blockchain technology can be successfully used to:

  • Share content and manage intellectual property rights through blockchain-based licensing, providing novel ways to distribute, buy, (re)-use media content and to open the news/media content market to new players.
  • Explore the means for independent content creators to easily distribute their content online ensuring fair remuneration.
  • Identify ways to enhance trust among news/media organisations and reinforce the notion that collaboration – even among competitors – has noticeably positive effects.
  • Provide effective control over who is going to reuse the content.

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Photo by Klāvs Taimiņš on Unsplash

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