'The Red Ape Family' rakes in a couple of million dollars as NFT enthusiasts queue up to buy episodes of the animated series.
NFTs, cryptocurrency, metaverse, Ethereum, blockchain … although these terms have become a regular feature of our lives, I must confess I have never associated any of them with TV or streaming.
Not until I heard about an animation series called The Red Ape Family (TRAF), the brainchild of an animation artist and an NFT marketeer in Dubai, and how they have used it to monetise their content. Between them, they came up with a drama series starring NFT characters and guess what? Even before the first episode was officially screened, they’d made a million dollars selling the same edition to 333 people and still retaining the IP for the production. They have enjoyed the same success with the second episode. None of the drama of pitching a pilot to several people and hoping some funding will come in. At a time when so many fantastic scripts do not see the light of day for lack of funding, here are some industry folk who have disrupted the market. Our cover story brings you some details that will leave you speechless.
But there is also an ugly side to NFTs that we haven’t quite learnt much about, and that’s the carbon footprint they leave behind. The sale of a piece of crypto art, for instance, reportedly consumes as much energy as a studio uses in two years. So, how much energy is potentially consumed when an eight-minute video is sold and resold, one wonders. While I’m no expert on energy consumption, the basic idea is that NFTs are digital tokens, and their authenticity and transactions can be traced and verified through a process called mining. This involves a network of computers that uses advanced cryptography to check the veracity of transactions and, in turn, consume a lot of energy. That energy is reported to lead to carbon emissions – a lot of it. This is no tall story, so we hope that as we begin to navigate the world of NFTs, we may also consider ways to mitigate its effect on the environment. For now, we hope we are able to introduce you to a new way to monetise your content.
