Video marketplace as a new approach to Crowd Journalism using a blockchain-based infrastructure

Abstract

From the start of the 21st century, the social media networks have reached a ruling level of usage and significance on social connectivity and will certainly continue to be the main form of social interaction in the next generations. Most of these social networks are centralized platforms ruled by a single organization owner, raising critical trust and ownership concerns over the content created and shared. Furthermore, there has been a significant growth of the technologies evolving smartphones and its components and functionality, giving to ordinary people the power of creating good-quality content using only their smartphones. This phenomenon contributed to the rise of crowd-streaming and crowd-journalism and its acceptance by the journalistic community all around the world. This work intends to conceive and develop a marketplace of multimedia content based on a decentralized social media network. The web platform is responsible for saving the live-made videos, allowing its visualization, rating and transactions between its owners and potential buyers. All the system mechanism uses smart contracts in a blockchain environment. This work also focuses on understanding how is the usability affected by the decentralized approach and what are the methods, precautions and strategies needed to improve the system's user experience. Regarding this work, the expected impact lies in recognizing the potential benefits of the decentralized approach over the centralized world of social networking as well as effectively propose and implement user interface and experience strategies to support this revolution.