Most people think streaming changed everything. It did, just not in the way we hoped.
If anything, the story of film and TV over the past hundred years is a story of control. It’s about who gets to fund the work, who gets to distribute it, who makes money from it, and who doesn’t. The technology keeps evolving, but the power structures? They’ve remained surprisingly constant.
And today, they’re more concentrated than ever.
To understand what needs to change, and how blockchain might actually offer a better path forward, we need to rewind. Because the system we’re living with today is just the latest version of a long-standing pattern.
The Studio Era: When One Company Owned It All
In the early 1900s, Hollywood’s original powerhouses, MGM, Warner Bros., Paramount, controlled everything. They owned the production studios, they owned the distribution pipelines, and they even owned the theaters where audiences watched the films.
This setup, known as vertical integration, was efficient. It let the studios scale quickly, pump out movies, and dominate the market. But it also locked out independent voices. If you weren’t inside the system, your film didn’t get made. Or if it did, it didn’t get seen.
It wasn’t just a business model, it was a gatekeeping machine.
The Paramount Decree: A Window Opens
Then came a shake-up. In 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the studios in what’s now known as the Paramount Decree. It forced them to sell off their theater chains, breaking the full-stack control they had over film.
The result? A wave of independent filmmakers stepped into the space. Studios shifted focus toward production and away from distribution. For a few decades, there was real creative breathing room. If you had a great idea and a small team, you could build something.
It didn’t last.
The Conglomerates Strike Back
Starting in the 1980s, major media companies, Disney, Time Warner, NBCUniversal, Viacom, started consolidating again. This time, the control came through different layers: cable channels, home video rights, syndication, and eventually global TV networks.
They didn’t need to own the theaters anymore. They were the pipeline.
By the 2000s, most people were consuming media that flowed through just a handful of corporations. Creative decisions were increasingly tied to shareholder value, not audience needs, and certainly not creator equity.
Streaming: Revolution or Reinvention?
Then came the streaming era. Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Disney+, massive platforms with global reach, direct-to-consumer models, and vast data infrastructures.
At first, it felt like freedom. No more cable boxes. No more gatekeepers. But we quickly learned something else: in streaming, the real power isn’t just in distribution, it’s in the data.
Today, creators often have no idea how their content is performing. Viewership numbers, engagement metrics, even basic revenue attribution, it’s all locked behind closed doors. You can’t negotiate a better deal when you don’t even know how your last show performed.
And it’s not just about money. Data shapes the creative process itself. Algorithms decide what gets promoted, what gets buried, what gets greenlit.
We’ve gone from studio execs in boardrooms to opaque machine-learning models that no one outside the platform controls. Different tools. Same outcome.
And What About the Audience?
Here’s the kicker: through all these evolutions, the audience, the people who fund this entire ecosystem through subscriptions, ticket sales, and attention, have always been treated as passive consumers.
They’ve had no say in what gets made, no access to ownership, and no meaningful connection with the creators they support.
That’s not just a missed opportunity. It’s a broken model. Because today’s fans want more than a like button. They want a stake.
What Happens Next?
We’re standing at a crossroads. The infrastructure has changed, but the power dynamics haven’t. And that’s where things get interesting.
Because for the first time in a century, we’re not just shifting who controls the system, we have the chance to rebuild it entirely.
In Part 2, I’ll explore what that actually looks like, and how blockchain, transparency, and community-driven platforms can give creators and audiences the power they’ve always deserved.
Stay tuned.
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