It was back in 2012 when I became EP of a major motion picture with a multi million dollar budget. I was also a major investor in the film. In addition to acquiring shoot locations, talent and funds I was tasked with developing the website in order to sell the film. Keep in mind this was a startup independent film. Needless to say I was also heavily into mining and acquiring bitcoin at the time and wanted to be able to sell the film for bitcoin to increase awareness of the film within the BTC community while also receiving bitcoin in exchange for the download of the film. I thought the PR value alone for the film was worth this. Sounds easy right? I figured over time bitcoin would appreciate. I set up the bitcoin wallet for the production company at Coinbase, a backup wallet using bitcoin core and then set up the transaction plugin from Gourl.IO for WordPress. It did not take more than a couple weeks to configure, test and then deploy everything. All I was waiting for was the digital copy of the film and I was set to begin marketing and selling the film to the bitcoin community directly from the films website.
I of course had all of the approvals to do this. Like I stated before I was a major investor in the film and was a part of the film investor group. I let my team and the director/creator of the film know that this had been implemented and deployed and we should begin marketing this asap. Mind you bitcoin was $13.51 at this time. My goal was to have film fans and bitcoin fans to buy a copy of the film directly from the film website using bitcoin. I figured that many bitcoin hodlers at that time were looking for unique ways to spend their bitcoin and might check out the film because of this.
My goal at the time was to get say 300 people in the entire world to buy a copy of this film using bitcoin. 300 total.
The director and team thought I was certifiable and did not help me in any way to get this going. They thought bitcoin was a complete joke and the entire thing would fall flat on its face eventually.
Well soon after I had deployed this the director of the film claimed that all of the marketing money was gone (250K) and decided that he was going to give away the production rights to the film to an outside distributor who took total control of the film away from myself and the original investor group and this of course included the website.
Noone in this distribution group knew diddly squat about developing websites or integrating a bitcoin payment system for that matter as the online film distribution industry at that time AMAZON/NETFLIX/HULU/YOUTUBE in 2012 was still trying to figure out how to sell films online and was essentially in its infancy. So needless to say this distribution group failed miserably selling the film in distribution.
Anyway, had 300 people paid one bitcoin ($13.51) in 12/2012 to see the film, the investor group would have 300 bitcoin in their possession right now at todays price of $4,600.00 per bitcoin which would equal $1,380,000.00. This would have paid back the entire investor group and the film might have over time possibly broken even.
Anyway I just thought I would share that with the class today. Just wanted to put that out there on the record and remind us all of the old saying “You dont know what you got till its gone”.
Peace,
KR