Think about it: you have to pay streaming services to watch their content — streaming services must pay to promote their content — AND viewers still get stuck with indecision… Over 534 new shows air every year. We are in a post-must-see-TV era. Don’t get me wrong, I love binging new shows on Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon as much as anyone, but isn’t it bizarre how much time and money these content distributors, viewers and advertisers are all required to spend in a centralized manner?
Enter Sator: a shift in the paradigm. The Sator network (network as in a system of interconnected things) is a decentralized approach for mainstream television. Sator makes it possible for viewers and content distributors to each earn rewards for their contribution to the television ecosystem. At this point, you might be asking: “decentralized? What does that mean? How can this possibly work?” Don’t worry, we are going to walk through how this network works with a few examples.
First, let’s talk about decentralized vs. centralized systems. In short, centralized systems rely on a single entity that often serves as a middle man for most transactions. This could be a bank, verifying monetary transactions, or a brokerage matching buyers and sellers. Decentralized systems remove these middle-men, and instead use a community of individuals to allow for such transactions. There are pros and cons to decentralized approaches. The major pro is it removes the single entity that receives massive payouts and controls the wellbeing of the system. The cons, however, are that decentralized approaches could be more expensive and slower than centralized approaches. Here, we think the pros may outweigh the cons in the context of mainstream television.
This concept of decentralization is the backbone of some of the hottest topics these days: blockchain and cryptocurrency. Indeed, Sator is fueled by its own, novel cryptocurrency, SAO.
Okay, so now that we know what it means to be decentralized, let’s zoom in on how Sator harnesses this. First, let’s start from the point of view of the content distributor. A content distributor in television typically has one goal in mind: get lots of viewers. Typically this is done by generating binge-worthy content; however it is also important to be on the right channel or streamer. It is also important to implement effective marketing that generates viewership, hours watched and subscribers. Unfortunately, engaging viewers is tricky. Emotionally connecting with viewers is important, yet bidirectional communication to understand viewer thinking is lacking. Marketing dollars are limited and there’s no guarantee of results. Or is there… With Sator, content distributors are able to “stake” instead of spend. Staking is just another way of saying ‘keeping your money locked up’: it’s still your money, not spent, but it’s just in a computerized lockbox. . As viewers engage with the SATOR platform, rewards get distributed to them — like a savings account for how much TV you watch. Some of these rewards are also distributed throughout other users in the network, for example, to the distributor that provided the content you binged. Within Sator, value moves around in the form of SAO tokens. SAO rewards and fuels the distributed network, rewarding both viewers and content distributors for their respective participation. Pretty neat!
Wait, so viewers are paid to watch shows? Yep. But there are some catches of course. For one, the content distributors don’t make it easy to earn their content’s rewards. As mentioned above, the content distributors stake to have their show activated on the Sator network. The value they stake translates directly into SAO tokens to be earned by viewers for completing certain tasks. Perhaps there is a QR code hidden somewhere in the show that when scanned, rewards the viewer with some tokens. Or maybe the content distributor sets up their show such that the most liked reviews about their show receives payout weekly. Meanwhile, a show-related trivia question may appear mid-show where correct answers are rewarded with SAO tokens. Then, immediately after watching an episode, viewers can earn access to episode-specific NFTs. Altogether, the Sator platform enables a whole new mechanism to gain and engage viewers. Sator provides the bridge between broadcast and digital — engineering “participation TV” for the era of blockchain technology.
To recap: content distributors get to stake SAO tokens to activate their show on the Sator network (interconnected system). That staked value is then distributed to the show’s viewers (rather than a single third party). The more value that the content distributor chooses to reward, the more viewers they are likely to gain. While content creators always want to make their show as binge-worthy as possible, a little extra SAO may go a long way in simplifying viewer choice.
Still, there is a bit more to it: for example, not all viewers are rewarded equally. The more SAO tokens an account holds, the bigger their rewards will be (again, like a savings account). This gives 1) a reason for viewers to want SAO tokens and 2) protects against network attacks (e.g., someone cannot make 1,000 accounts to receive 1,000x rewards). Further, there are daily network payouts beyond those defined by the content distributors. This incentivizes overall network participation — the more individuals interact with the network, whether viewers or distributors, they get paid out daily. How is this possible? Because there is not one single entity or company taking a majority of the payout. Rather, this payout is sent to everyone. This will all be covered in a future article: A Deep Dive into Sator Token Economics.
Until then!
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