Prashan Agarwal is one of India’s most recognized entrepreneurs, having developed some of the most well-known companies in the country. After starting a successful career in real estate, Agarwal joined music streaming platform Gaana, raising more than $200 million for the web2 company. 

But for his latest venture, FanTV, the decentralized content streaming platform for which he’s co-founder and chief executive officer, Agarwal has transitioned to web3 and blockchain to build a creator-centric entertainment platform.

After witnessing firsthand the struggles faced by independent artists, Agarwal decided to launch FanTV as a creator-focused company that solves artists' most pressing issues, and has raised over $5.5 million in seed funding for the platform, which currently boasts over 7 million users.

“From my background in the music industry I’ve seen a lot of the problems faced by independent creators, which broadly are discovery, distribution and monetization,” Agarwal said to me during a recent interview. “If you don’t get discovered, there’s no distribution, there’s no monetization. The biggest thing we want to solve with FanTV is enabling the discovery of artists by decentralizing the entire ‘view’ mechanism, and then enabling distribution and monetization to the tokenomics of the platform.”

FanTV uses artificial intelligence (AI) to power its video streaming platform, where users and creators can create and watch content and get rewarded—which is how creators get paid. The company offers long- and short-form videos and live streaming, which it partnered with Huddle01 to provide. 

“We’ve been seeing APAC [Asia-Pacific] creators use servers that are either located in the United States or another region where the creators are not located,” Ayush Ranjan, chief executive officer of Huddle01, said to me during a recent interview. “That leads to poor quality of calls and live streams, where they break a lot and there’s a lot of muffling. That’s why we wanted to build a people-powered network.”

Ayush Ranjan

The idea behind Huddle01’s infrastructure is that if a participant on a video conference call has a solid Internet connection, they can become a node, and power the call for all participants involved.

“That solves better performance because now, all call participants are closer together, leading to a better quality of call,” Ranjan said. “Also, the money being paid to data centers or Jeff Bezos now goes to you and me. That was the whole mission and vision behind building Huddle01.”

Hudde01, which is used by more than 7 million people, is building out a deeper network that powers audio and video, with FanTV now the largest onboarding platform for the company. Both firms are hoping that over time more creators will own their data, a system only available through blockchain tech.

“People will be shifting to these systems where they’ll have their own creator economy and their own creator tokens, where the value accrues more and more, creating a circular economy altogether,” Ranjan said.

But beyond data ownership, the potential for greater content monetization could also be a huge motivating factor for creators to embrace decentralized content platforms like FanTV. 

“The revenue share is very skewed in the web2 world,” Agarwal said. “Platforms eat up to 50 percent of revenues that are due to the creator because centralized platforms are hungry for revenues. That’s not the case in the web3 world, where people become the node and are rewarded for participating. Creators are then given more than their fair share, almost 90 percent in the case of FanTV.”

Rewards are given to content creators, local node providers, and content consumers, creating a fully decentralized creator economy. Users who are streaming can run the nodes themselves.

A bridge from web2 to web3

“With 7 million users, we are the largest project in the Sui ecosystem,” Agarwal said. “This enables us to onboard creators across different countries, with creators from Nigeria, Vietnam, Turkey, India and the Middle East. The entire monetization mechanism has been enabled from day 0, and it’s solved for as soon as users plug into the blockchain.”

Agarwal said during his time producing music for independent artists, he witnessed how centralized platforms had algorithms that determined views and monetization, with the largest creators eating up the majority of the pie. 

“The biggest power that comes from blockchain for creators is owning the user/fan data and owning their content,” he said. “If creators decide to enable their user bases on a different platform, they are free to do that because the data is owned by them.”

But for the future of created content to truly be democratized, Internet connections need to be improved universally, and with an improved Internet connection comes less reliance on centralized data centers and data servers.

“If you look at the Internet and how it disseminated across the globe, everyone uses it,” Agarwal said. “We want blockchain to be pervasive so that anyone in the world uses it. Our biggest vision for the next few years is that everyone is a creator. With AI coming into the picture, it’s making content creation very easy and very seamless. Over time, I think AI will do its job, but the creator will remain the one who needs to bring the emotional aspect to creativity.”

Agarwal also cautioned that with AI, too much content will become created, an oversaturation he believes will create a new set of problems for the entertainment industry.

“I think people who adopt AI quickly but who still blend their own creativity—they will be the winners in the long term,” he said. “We want to be decentralized and enable more and more node operators to come into the fold so that all the rewards go back to the users and creators.”

And if FanTV is to see its vision of large scale AI adoption amongst content creators actualized, they’ll actually need to tap the web2 world.

“To cross that chasm we’ll need those creators,” Ranjan said. “FanTV is in both the web2 and web3 worlds and understands what both worlds need.”

FanTV is planning to abstract away the web3 complexity of the platform so that creators eventually aren’t even talking about the blockchain element.

“The lines between web2 and web3 are blurring,” Agarwal said. “Maybe in a year or two, the user will just see the creator. What will sit in between is immaterial. The idea for us is to make the experience seamless so that people just come to the platform, consume content, and earn on the side. It’s kind of a win-win for everyone.”

lead image: Prashan Agarwal