would it have been possible with the blockchain?

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

Paramount and MTV

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

During the 1980s and 1990s of the last century, it became a true point of reference for the global musical community, especially for the youth.

With the success of the Internet, however, it entered into a crisis.

Starting from the early 2000s, it began to program content that was not specifically musical, but it was not enough.

In 2010 it ceased to be a musical TV, and since then it has no longer been a protagonist.

Since 1985 MTV has belonged to Viacom, which in 2019 became Paramount Global.

So MTV has belonged to the same ownership for almost 40 years, even though in the meantime the ownership has changed name and structure.

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

The website of MTV, Mtv.com, was created in 1995, and was mainly known for news and interviews.

But MTV News was shut down last year due to financial problems of the parent company, Paramount Global, and therefore effectively stopped producing news and interviews to publish on the site.

On Monday, Paramount Global decided to eliminate the entire news section from the site, including the twenty-year archive. Now the mtv.com/news section of the site redirects to the home page, because it is simply no longer online.

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

Paramount: the blockchain could have saved Mtv.com

What most annoyed the fans 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 claim that in this way decades of cultural history have been destroyed due to a centralized point of failure, and that this is one of the many reasons why the future of media would be on-chain.

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

However, an important clarification needs to be made.

On true decentralized blockchains, the cost of data registration is quite high. This means that there is a tendency not to register all the actual data, but unique hashes that represent them.

There are, however, complementary services that allow you to associate a file with those hashes, and some of these are also decentralized.

It should be noted, however, that for example, the video of an interview can generate a file of several Megabytes, if not even Gigabytes, so the cost of a true on-chain permanent storage might not be negligible, especially in the case where many similar contents need to be archived.

Register or archive

Therefore, on one hand, there is the mere registration in blockchain, which can be economical but involves on-chain storage of only a unique hash code that represents the file.

Another thing is the actual storage of the entire file on-chain, which can be done but with much higher costs. Furthermore, even in this case, the platforms that allow the true storage of entire files on-chain actually keep 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 on multiple machines, in a distributed manner, but it is 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 storage spaces, but it is difficult to imagine that those who have a lot of content to store in this way will accept paying the high cost.

The future of data storage

Nonetheless, it is correct to state that the problem of the disappearance of public archives of news and interviews from Mtv.com is due to a centralized issue, as well as that the future is decentralization.

It is probably still 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.

Regarding the future of decentralization, the artist Mattia Cuttini stated:

“Blockchain technology but even more so decentralization represent more and more the future of media every day. Whether the data are works of art or articles on emerging bands, these new technologies are undoubtedly a step forward in preserving culture.”