Streaming TV is something easily taken for granted in a world of now on-demand-everything. Surprisingly, it’s only existed since the mid-2000s and resulted from someone realizing television could be transmitted over the web and deploying the tech to do so. That someone was Netflix and that accomplishment won them the lead in the Web 2.0 streaming industry . Twenty years later, someone else has realized television can be streamed over Web3 and is now building the tech to do so. That someone is Sator. This accomplishment will disrupt the half a trillion-dollar video streaming market and place Sator at the coveted helm of global media.
Sator sets a course to become a Web3 unicorn by solving a valuable set of commercial problems at-scale. Indeed, global television leaders recognize Sator as the first Web3 streaming network, and Sator’s position is protected by significant technological and strategic moats. In particular, Sator ships superior streaming, UX and blockchain technology faster and more effectively than its competitors. Simultaneously, Sator has established itself at the heart of major television rights markets as a go-to Web3 solution. Moreover, Sator’s team is highly motivated and proficient in the necessary and complex competencies needed to create significant value in a dynamic market.
SATOR BUIDLS
Sator directs its resources to engineering and product development. Sator has invested all its seed capital and revenues toward rapidly building cross-device infrastructure that facilitates Web3 distribution at-scale for major content rights holders. Accordingly, Sator has shipped its ambitious roadmap to date as planned and on time. Sator delivered an early consumer application linking content audiences with NFTs only within months of being founded. Following, Sator averaged 9 new builds per month of its mobile app alone, quickly being published in the Google Play store. Then, interfacing directly with Apple, Sator mainnet achieved its iOS store listing, becoming a first web3 dApp featuring in-app purchase of on-chain Solana-based NFTs. Also in Sator’s genesis year, Sator published its browser-based NFT marketplace on Sator.io, Sator’s VR metaverse 1.0, plus Sator’s NFT-based P2E game, “Satorspace.”
While Sator’s earliest features aimed to decentralize the value created around TV programming through rewards mechanisms, Sator’s fast-paced development uncovered additional superior approaches. Namely, the original Sator platform features successfully deployed proof-of-engagement mechanisms, e.g. W2E, whereby viewers could earn value for content they were already watching. Yet, various limitations to this model quickly crystalized, obliging a recalibration of Sator’s technical product to truly tokenize the untapped ‘network value’ surrounding popular TV content. Instead of directly paying viewers, Sator’s technology now has the ability to supplant outdated OTT models of AVOD and SVOD with NFT-based and staking-based VOD. This achieves a healthier alignment of economic interests among all participants — audiences and rights holders — in what effectively becomes a bigger (and more decentralized) pie for all. The future of television is immersive.
Thanks to swift innovation at Sator, valuable lessons, pivots and market opportunities have been coalesced into a cutting edge market-leading position and strategy. Such are the spoils of an efficient start-up team truly dedicated to building smarter, earlier and more inventively for the audiences of the future. Prioritizing BUIDL above all else is a choice that has earned Sator revenues since month one, and increasingly since. Further, post-revenue success has enabled Sator to sustain an ample bench of world class engineering talent vis-à-vis competitive projects. Teamwork, planning and technical excellence pervade Sator culture.
SATOR SUPERIOR TECHNOLOGY
Solving meaningful commercial problems informed by extensive, ongoing research, Sator aims at clear targets that drive innovation. Sator’s unique tech stack, presently and in development, stands testament to technical acumen and efficiency. Adapting existing components in combination with pioneering new software, Sator introduces new technological capabilities that lead to new advancements in interactive, viewer-owned television. Case in point, the backend solution Sator invented in order to achieve in-app purchase parameters of app publishers comprises custom smart contracts that automatically carry out the token portion of NFT transaction while delivering simple UI/UX of an everyday in-app purchase. This seamless solution implemented by top Sator engineers reflects adaptive problem-solving and sheer aptitude in frontier technologies.
Another cogent example of ingenuity at Sator is the NFT-based VOD, or “NFT-VOD.” This “NFT-VOD” will disrupt traditional OTT widely cited as broken by numerous content executives and analysts due to “streaming wars .” To clarify, those casualties are typically considered to include YoY declines in ad revenues plus the negative subscription patterns of high churn rates and subscription-hoppers. Moreover, Sator researchers further studied current states of OTT technology through a lens of tokenization and network value. Afterall, film and television VOD content generates substantial network value, yet that value significantly — if not almost entirely — dissipates at the conclusion of a title (e.g. a final season, or the conclusion of a film’s life cycle). Moreover, the largest contributors to that value — the audience — are not included in the accrual mechanisms of that value. Tokenizing the network value surrounding content, plus diffusing that value throughout the ecosystem, means accruing value to the audience in a non-zero-sum way with respect to rights owners.
Tokenizing VOD distribution and engagement is an improvement on the status quo because smart contracts have a richer and more frictionless design space. Tokens can be distributed programmatically, with the potential to reward participants for their respective contributions at customizable trigger events. Effectively free to deploy, tokens, whether non-fungible or utility, elevate content distribution to create provenance in an open, transparent, and infinitely programmable manner.
Sator has scoped the at-scale delivery of global VOD through tokenized infrastructure. Declining ad-based and high-churn subscription-based models stand to be competed away by the powerful alignment effected through token-granted access to streaming content. Currently under development at Sator, the “Sator Stream” verification API will link NFT ownership to corresponding streaming TV channel access. Sator Stream API will enable groundbreaking utility in NFT content, skyrocketing Sator NFT distribution numbers. Remarkably, Sator Stream becomes a key enterprise white-label solution for to incumbent web2 streamers, empowering legacy streamers to convert high-churn subscriptions and decreasing ad sales to higher returns and greater impact as NFTs. At scale, turnkey, the Sator Stream API solves a massive blocker for global content rights holders who are persistently seeking ways to enter the digital asset space they know will dominate the next era of multimedia.
An additionally remarkable feature of staking-based VOD is enabled by Sator Stream API natively on Sator. Between the Sator mobile app and Sator OTT streamer, Sator Stream API verifies $SAO staked in-wallet to unlock viewing access to Sator television–resulting in novel staking-based VOD. Sator’s visionary smart contract engineers are implementing smart contracts with cross-chain interoperability whilst verifying $SAO held by in-app wallets to unlock ongoing OTT streaming access. Whether staking the network’s social utility token, $SAO, or holding NFTs of content being watched, a viewer accesses greater economic value and enhanced entertainment experience by automatically demonstrating proof of ownership of relevant assets. In short, Sator’s white-label Sator Stream verification API brings television into the ownership economy in a meaningful and elegant way. Vis-à-vis being force-fed ads or charged a subscription with nothing to show for it afterward, new content delivery infrastructure offers superior consumer product and market fit.
Ownership economics achieve distribution of intrinsic network value around a title or titles such that the rights holder can then access, influence, mobilize, leverage and grow that value for myriad content distribution, marketing, revenue and strategic purposes. To illustrate in a tangible way, a final season of a popular title, such as Game of Thrones, viewed via NFT-VOD could encompass enduring fan loyalty through airdrops supporting its later spin-offs, continued audience engagement via secondary markets and user-generated content. Additionally, from the rights owners perspective, such NFT-VOD revenue eclipses what it supplants — higher per unit pricing is realized thanks to increased utility and perceived value, compared to subscription only, or subscription alongside disparate NFT art devoid of utility. Put simply, in today’s model, when the season is over, the subscription is canceled. In tomorrow’s model, the content takes on additional life cycles via user-owned tradeable and programmable digital assets. Ultimately, Sator marries the viewing experience with the NFT experience, at scale, for the world’s largest slates of mainstream content. This sets the stage for next-gen content distribution whereby NFT-VOD assets gain further utility, moats and tokenized network value when open world formats are added to Sator’s cross-platform ecosystem. These emerging platforms invite viewers to utilize their playable character NFT avatars and items in open world formats featuring games, content streaming, social networking and other immersive Web3 features as they continue to mature.
It would be remiss not to mention the emphasis Sator maintains on cybersecurity and risk management. From company-wide protocols as simple as detail-oriented sprint planning, scoping and anticipating blockers in advance to initiatives as complex as security audits, third-party QA, bounties and threshold testing, Sator ensures products only go to market in their utmost robust and secure modality — as required by this complex B2B2C ecosystem.
Sator’s technical build rests upon Go, Unity, Rust, Solana Smart Contracts, Wormhole, React, Next, Javascript, Flutter, Replicant, Genesysgo and Metaplex, alongside several other APIs and various original development by Sator’s in-house engineering team. Sator is opensource and long-term fully interoperable with multiple blockchains. In addition to being Solana native, Sator interfaces and collaborates with technical teams at Polygon/MATIC, Polkadot/Parity and Chainlink.
SATOR GLOBAL CONTENT LICENSING
Global content rights holders turn to Sator due to a combination of factors including media industry expertise of Sator leadership; effective B2B strategic marketing; repeatable internal processes; and long-term monetization prospects with Sator network.
Vast film, television, music and media experience has been brought to Sator by its Board Advisors and President with relationships across television/film distributors, streaming networks, agents, producers, record labels and other rights aggregators. Advisors to Sator include Rob Weiss (HBO Ballers, HBO Entourage) and Damien Mckay (Universal Pictures). Chris Martin, Sator’s President, previously ran a touring music company with Live Nation for 5 years, produced Atlantic Records content, managed artist brand SxSW deals for Warner Brother Records, led PR for international talent and Oscar-nominated films, and developed and produced various film and television properties. Additionally formidable Advisors are joining Sator from Starz and Tubi. Altogether, the reach and proficiency of Sator’s founding team and Board Advisors encompass all relevant content rights, customers and objectives at which Sator aims.
Fortified by Sator’s inherent industry expertise, B2B marketing commenced at the outset. Targeting leading television markets around the world, Sator has laid foundations for broad content onboarding and long-term enterprise customers growing in tandem with Sator product development. International marketplaces are the center of global rights licensing, distribution and transactions; where a majority of the world’s content distribution rights are transacted. These marquis forums — MIPCOM, NATPE, NAB, Realscreen Summit and the like — have elevated Sator visibility among rights holders requiring Sator’s turnkey solution for their content slates’ Web3 distribution. Among licensing decision makers, Sator has gained reputational capital by exhibiting and marketing heavily on-location. Sator has attended, keynoted, sponsored and demonstrated Web3 technologies on-site to global streamers, distributors and rights owners around the globe. Industry leading events including Streaming+, NATPE, Mipcom, MipTV and more have featured Sator as the only NFT and Web3 solution, partner and keynote. In fact, to date, Sator has been the exclusive blockchain company participating in these markets. Sator continuously stands out for establishing strategic inroads for effectual B2B marketing across global media and entertainment using frontier technologies in the most actionable ways.
Since assurance of long-term growth derives from repeatable processes to produce returns, Sator methodically implements repeatable processes for managing B2B customer procurement. From persuasive B2B marketing collateral and presentations, to sophisticated legal infrastructure and follow-up, Sator has internally standardized the progression of prospecting, deal closing and management. Even ‘custom’ packages Sator proposes leverage internal formulas for scale. Simply, Sator conserves resources while making it easy for customers to onboard. During startup phase, Sator instituted procedural efficiency, achieving POC plus post-revenue, simultaneously through iteration. Entering new chapters of high growth rates, Sator will amplify results by adding VP of Content Partnerships role, CRM transition and certain UI/UX features for B2B customer self-serve product enhancements.
Sator’s appeal to rights owners increasingly relates to the upcoming OTT Sator channel. Attributable to rights holders in the business of monetizing IP, this aspect of Sator as potential licensor incentivizes holders to cement relationships with Sator. Consequently, and by design, owners and distributors of massive slates of premium content are drawn to Sator both for current enterprise products and for the possibility of being prioritized in licensing their content to the Sator OTT channel. Understanding how the OTT streamer is accessed via NFTs, rights holders perceive increased upside for their NFT strategies overall. Such multi-faceted enterprise products by Sator create sticky customers. Customarily, executives articulate to Sator, “despite every NFT platform knocking at our doors, we choose to work with you because of Sator’s technology and content streaming surrounding NFT capabilities.” Owners of premium content recognize Sator as the only solution truly built with their business needs in mind. Adding Web3 OTT streaming opportunities on top of current NFT distribution, in-app NFT purchases, content streaming on mobile, VR metaverse events and content gamification has made Sator a compelling value proposition. Hence, rights holders gravitating to Sator reflects their anticipation of Sator as the paramount solution for Web3 licensing, monetization and distribution at-scale.
SATOR SOLVES VALUABLE PROBLEMS
Sator addresses fragmentation and subscription fatigue, increasingly plaguing the entertainment landscape and specifically hurting streaming VOD (video on demand). At the same time, Sator removes NFT friction for non-crypto-natives and deeply aligns interests among all ecosystem participants. In short, Sator leads technology-based solutions at the commercial intersection of streaming television and Web3.
The traditional VOD market is highly fragmented. Fragmentation derives from the presence of too many players, competition among vendors, intensifying rivalry from new entrants and advancing technologies. This has led many established industry participants to pursue partnerships in order to expand their product portfolio to new areas. In this regard, Sator serves media players’ current appetites for partnerships that expand their businesses to new technology-enabled segments, namely Web3. Many VOD and OTT players are motivated to prioritize a Sator partnership to boost their attainment of Web3 OTT market share since OTT, fragmented as it may be, still grows at record rates. Experts say OTT app usage will double by 2024 to more than $200 billion, and last year in the US alone over 15 million years’ worth of content was streamed.
As OTT streaming exerts dominance over entertainment and players fight for share, consumers are becoming increasingly frustrated. Current reality is well described as “subscription fatigue.” Watching subscription-based OTT video services (SVOD ) is a daily habit for 60% of adults in the US. However, many viewers are tired of subscribing to multiple services. Deloitte Global predicts that SVOD will see 150 million service cancellations in 2022. That’s a global churn rate of 30%. Roughly 1/3 of US consumers in 2022 have canceled — or canceled and added, i.e. hopped — a streaming service in any 6 month period. This problem fuels increased innovation in terms of trends for OTT video monetization — providers have been turning to pay-per-view, advertising and new tech-enabled alternatives such as Web3. Web3 features applied to OTT, as seen in Sator’s product portfolio, relieve fatigue of multiple subscriptions by replacing those monthly liabilities with digital asset ownership. Digital assets can embed OTT content access and grow into collections held over time as well as easily create secondary markets and revenue streams for value transfer.
Digital assets, Web3 technologies and the evolution of NFTs into use-cases like Sator Stream NFT-VOD are unfolding in real time. As emerging technology, the sector invents, iterates, configures and reconfigures with quilt-like patchwork innovation. Consequently, there arises friction at every level of the stack, posing real obstacles to implementation and hesitation on the part of decision makers and consumers alike. Removing friction in blockchain’s practical application will differentiate the ultimate Web3 winners from the Pets.com of Web3 . Sator has engineered frictionless NFT features for non-crypto-natives and legacy corporations to onboard mass audiences of film and television to NFT collecting and utility. Sator’s UI/UX simplicity combined with backend ingenuity has entirely eliminated friction associated with acquiring and holding NFTs as well as utilizing NFTs in mainstream content value creation. Most notably, Sator has designed and deployed in-app-purchase features in Sator’s mobile app to achieve NFT transactions with ease, eliminating any need for user expertise or effort in creating a wallet, connecting a wallet and using a wallet. Sator’s in-app-purchase of NFTs solves a massive pain point expressed by myriad owners of popular IP: ‘we don’t want to teach our fans about crypto in order for them to be able to collect our NFTs.’ Sator eliminates such friction between rights holders and fans.
Another salient problem facing all owners of large slates of premium content (thousands of hours of television/film/video) in terms of using Web3 functionality is scalability. While it’s become exceedingly easy to drop an NFT, there’s a pronounced dearth of implementable NFT solutions on libraries of 15,000 film titles or 20,000 hours of television. Inefficiencies amplify when institutional rights holders evaluate large-scale scenarios of one-off NFT efforts on title-by-title basis. In short, opportunities without scale don’t deliver ROI on efforts, especially in the context of risks and overhead inherent in new technologies. Hesitancy is exacerbated by lack of in-house expertise at media companies, potential engineering costs and the unknown unknowns. Solving for these real world challenges demands infrastructure that is (1) scalable, and (2) turnkey. Scale on a turnkey basis is the core of Sator product. Sator eliminates friction for non-crypto-native media executives as much as for non-crypto-native audiences. While such an accomplishment is not rapid, solving the scalability problem for the VOD industry naturally looking to expand to Web3 is immensely valuable. How valuable? Over this decade, global VOD market value projections approach half a trillion dollars.
Yet, of arguably even greater value is the previously untapped network value of communities surrounding popular content. Imagine aligning interests among those creating that value together. Imagining, then designing, that advancement is precisely what Sator team continues to accomplish. This problem was the status quo, so identifying and solving it took the visionaries behind Sator. It’s two-sided problem in the content ecosystem — first, audiences have lacked the mechanism to participate in value created by their attention and fandom, while; secondly, content owners have lost massive value unrealized as communities dissipate at the end of a TV series, season or film cycle. Programmatically and securely encapsulating that value, easily transferrable, exemplifies a use-case best addressed by blockchain technology. Being blue ocean, the quantifiable value of tokenized network effect around content would require some multivariable calculus functions to account for factor variability. Although estimating precise economic value of such, historically obscured, network worth may be left to the mathematicians, knowing it by definition to be a factor of the world’s $2.5 trillion entertainment market size affirms a ballpark of substantial value.
SATOR DEFENSIBLE MOATS
Diligent student of potential competition, Sator deliberately creates moats. By way of its differentiated product, proprietary engineering components, contemporary legal framework and tactical business development strategy, Sator gains ground that is protected, sustainable and long-lasting.
Uniquely combined technology, Sator blends adapted existing with invented novel modules. Leveraging opensource as much as patent-pending elements creates barriers difficult for others to replicate Sator’s unique formula. That is to say, while Solana is available for anyone to build upon, a moat results from the combination of what Sator builds on-chain with what Sator invents that is proprietary. Such moats are further defended by competency. Certainly, multichain smart contract engineering is a relatively inaccessible talent pool to many mid-tier media companies focused on IP acquisitions, production, licensing and the like. At the same time, blockchain’s young state overall further discourages competitors on account of the extremely heavy lift and long horizon involved in winning B2B traction. This moat relates to willingness to achieve difficult goals. In other words, the amount of development effort required serves as a moat discouraging competition thanks to sheer difficulty.
Galvanized by meaningful investment in legal excellence, Sator also creates moats around the understanding and appetite for learning and implementing new standards of international legal compliance relating to Web3. Best-in-breed legal teams at Sator contribute organization across all relevant areas of law from securities, gaming and employment to contract, licensing and IP. Often empowering counsel of content partners activating on Sator, the Sator legal advantage is a moat of risk mitigation, aptitude and strength. Strong legal framework throughout Sator also fuels confidence, contributing to winning distinguished enterprise media partners.
Media companies are notorious for their gatekeepers. Sator enjoys the view from the other side of that naturally occurring moat against its competitors, thanks to relationships and experience of Sator founding team and Board (reference preceding section “Sator Attracts Global Content”).
SATOR WORLDCLASS TEAM
Sator’s team members are capable leaders, experienced, motivated, persistent and adaptive. The core Sator engineering team comprises equal parts front-end and back-end with combined skillsets spanning Rust, Unity, Go, Flutter, Dart, React, Python, Javascript, Solidity and smart contracts. Since forming, Sator has grown and ranged from 8 to 20+ total full-time team members representing combined business and engineering experience in excess of 100 years. Statistically, numerous data points pertaining to Sator’s founders and team suggest a high likelihood for success.
The top 3 college degrees held by CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are precisely the same 3 degrees held by Sator’s 2 co-founders: Engineering, Economics and Business. Sator’s CEO earned her Computer Science degree from NYU in New York. She also studied Linear Algebra and Discrete Mathematics at NYU London. She became Founder of Lean-in Circle NYU CS Girls in Tech. Upon graduation, she worked at Casper and other unicorn tech startups — founders who worked at unicorn startups have a higher success rate. She went on to be a Software Engineer at Chainalysis on the Nodes and Observations team. Directly prior to Sator, Sator’s CEO worked at Credit Suisse in Digital Assets. Reporting directly to the Head of Digital Assets, she productionized machine learning models in Python and built Rust APIs. She also built a private permissioned blockchain integrating with enterprise legacy systems at Credit Suisse. Plus, she developed a decentralized application for the Credit Suisse fleet management team encapsulating aviation data and smart contracts. On top of that, she also placed in the Global Future of Banking Hackathon in recognition for her machine-learning algorithm that successfully out-predicted US Treasury bond yield benchmark data by 92%. She built a neural network using GCP (google cloud platform), bigQuery ML software, Keras and Tencer flow which is a learning library. Earlier in her journey at Credit Suisse, she was also a Data Scientist on the Machine Intelligence and Semantic Technology team charged with sentiment analysis and natural language processing data. Engineers make good CEOs because they are problem-solvers, masters of data, collaborators and lifelong learners.
Vast technical acumen can be seen in Sator’s entire engineering team. Talent, commitment, vast experience leading R&D and deep expertise in Dev Ops characterize the most senior engineers at Sator. Sator’s Vice President of Engineering brought 14 years of web development experience in mobile app development, specifically Golang, successfully managing web and mobile application development through the entire life cycle from architecture and design to deployment and support. Equally notable, Sator’s Technical Product Manager brought 8 years of engineering and smart contract development experience to Sator. Developing and researching in blockchain since 2015 and earlier, Sator’s core team exhibit broad faculty for all aspects of Web3 technical product development.
Importance of assembling a world class team was a lesson Sator President brought to Sator thanks to past experience as a serial entrepreneur. There happens to be a very high percentage of billion-dollar companies that are started by repeat entrepreneurs.
GAINING WEB3 ENTERTAINMENT MARKETSHARE
The right team has come together at Sator to solve worthwhile problems by pioneering superior B2B2C technology infrastructure for Web3-based VOD content distribution at-scale. Sator’s distinctive approach serves its large and growing market while insuring moats and expanding the very frontiers of media and Web3 technology. Sator capabilities, technical roadmap, product portfolio, traction, addressable market size and tactical execution continue to amalgamate in ways that progress Sator toward potential Web3 unicorn status.
Valued at $40mm as of its recent series A transaction, Sator.io Corp has been post-revenue since mere months following its early 2021 launch. Already defying the odds as a startup, Sator focuses on customer success and product-market fit. Collecting customer feedback, solving customer problems, fortifying customer relationships and building simple customer UI/UX are cornerstones of Sator product development and revenue growth long term.
