Would this have been possible with the blockchain?

Paramount has taken the archives of the famous website Mtv.com offline, and some are wondering if this could have been avoided with the blockchain.

Paramount and MTV

MTV is a famous music television channel that was born in 1981.

In the 1980s and 1990s it became a true reference point for the global music community, especially for the youth.

However, the success of the Internet plunged it into crisis.

From the early 2000s it started programming content that was not specifically musical, but that was not enough.

It stopped being musical TV in 2010, and it hasn’t been a leading man since.

Since 1985, MTV has been part of Viacom, which became Paramount Global in 2019.

MTV has therefore been under the same owner for almost 40 years, even though the ownership has since changed name and structure.

Paramount ends Mtv.com: would it have been different with blockchain?

MTV’s website, Mtv.com, was created in 1995 and was primarily known for news and interviews.

But MTV News closed last year due to financial problems of its parent company, Paramount Global, and so effectively stopped producing news and interviews to publish on the site.

On Monday, Paramount Global decided to remove the site’s entire news section, including its 20-year archive. Now the mtv.com/news section of the site is being redirected to the homepage because it is simply no longer online.

The site still exists, just like MTV still exists, but only promotes the series that air on the TV channel. Practically speaking, there is no longer any trace of music or news on the site.

Most importantly, the blockchain could have saved Mtv.com

What irritated fans most is the disappearance of the archive, because it contained twenty years of musical and non-musical news.

Although there are still several online magazines that cover music news, the disappearance of that archive has not gone unnoticed.

There are those who argue that decades of cultural history have been destroyed in this way due to a centralized failure point, and that this is one of the many reasons why the future of media would be on-line.

The concept is that on a true decentralized blockchain, nothing can be deleted by anyone. Everything recorded on the blockchain lasts forever, as long as the blockchain remains active.

However, an important clarification needs to be made.

On true decentralized blockchains, data recording costs are quite high. This means that there is a tendency to not record all the actual data, but unique hashes that represent it.

However, there are additional services that allow you to associate a file with those hashes, and some of them are decentralized as well.

However, it should be noted that the video of an interview, for example, can generate a file of several megabytes, if not even gigabytes, so that the cost of a real permanent storage in the chain may not be negligible, especially in the case where many similar content must be archived.

Register or archive

Therefore, on the one hand, there is only registration in blockchain, which can be economical, but only a unique hash code representing the file is stored on the chain.

Another thing is the actual storage of the entire file in the chain, which can be done, but at a much higher cost. Furthermore, even in this case, the platforms that allow true on-chain storage of entire files actually store the files on machines controlled by individuals, and this constitutes a form of centralized storage.

The solution is to distribute multiple copies of the same file in a distributed manner across multiple machines, but it’s not easy to imagine that many would be willing to make large amounts of memory space on their machines available to everyone.

In fact, there is already a whole market for these on-chain distributed storages, but it’s hard to imagine that those who need to store a lot of content in this way will accept the high costs.

The future of data storage

Nevertheless, it is correct to say that the problem of the disappearance of public archives of news and interviews on Mtv.com is due to a centralized issue, and that the future is decentralization.

It’s probably too early to imagine that a company like Paramount Global could really resort to expensive decentralized solutions to store data that can instead be stored much more easily and, above all, much more economically with centralized solutions.

On the future of decentralization, artist Mattia Cuttini said:

“Blockchain technology, but especially decentralization, increasingly represents the future of media every day. Whether the data is works of art or articles about emerging bands, these new technologies are undoubtedly a step forward in preserving culture.”