Our MISSION is to deepen the connection between fans and the film & TV shows they love by building experiences powered by digital collectibles.

We remember what it was like to grow up combing through the aisles of Blockbuster, lobbying for the best pick that would power the ideal movie night amongst family and friends. Like many other young aspiring cinephiles, we even flexed our fandom by showing off our personal DVD shelves to friends that visited our homes — bonus points if they were alphabetically sorted or grouped by director, even. 

Similarly, many of us have fond memories collecting sports cards, meticulously organizing our binders with dozens of Michael Jordan’s and Ken Griffey Jr’s, hoping to strike gold. This gave way to playing video games that allowed us to craft our ideal fantasy lineups and eventually diving deep into fantasy sports itself, as watching live sports became a community-driven, competitive experience.

With decades of experience across film production, financing, distribution, talent representation, and finance, we always marveled at the sheer universality of the medium (EVERYONE watches movies & TV, whereas a very limited subset of people are interested in specific sports leagues, often impacted by geography or social dynamics). Given the massive reach that the industry has, we then wondered, why haven’t cinephiles been given the same means of personal expression and imaginative tools to enhance their experience.  As fans ourselves, we yearned for a world where we could own iconic moments from our favorite films and trade rare posters with other collectors, who might have that one missing piece that finished our collection. Why couldn’t die-hard fans of filmmakers like Tarantino or Scorsese compete to be the ultimate superfans with verifiable ways to calculate and demonstrate their collections across their digital and physical identities?

When our friends and investors at Dapper Labs launched NBA Top Shot a mere two years ago, a clear inflection point occurred. We saw digital ownership as the first pivotal step in creating a platform that could unite entertainment fans by verifying ownership over the assets they accumulate while also rewarding them for continuous participation in the entertainment flywheel. Technology had finally arrived with the ability to bring those wonderful experiences we had in the physical world, privately, into a communal arena that would greatly enhance our collective experience consuming content. 

Our founding team came together with the shared belief that film & TV audiences deserve a stronger value proposition in exchange for their consumption, engagement, and consistent promotion of beloved IP. With the support of our incredible network of investors, led by Castle Island Ventures, and with participation from Multicoin Capital, North Island Ventures, and Dapper Labs, we set out to build JUKE.

We have seen firsthand how film & TV goes from ideation to development to production to marketing to distribution and audience reception. There are fans every step of the way – from interacting with a trailer or promotional piece to sharing press or fostering discussion to viewing a series online or screening a film in the theater. We believe these highly engaged fans should receive something more for their engagement than simply “entertainment.”  Fan engagement feeds the entertainment industry — both the bottom line of the studios and also the careers of the creators — and yet, the fan is merely left looking for the next thing to consume. But what if we could offer the fan the ability to also receive additional value? Things like event invitations, free tickets, specialized digital and physical merchandise, the ability to build upon their various film & TV experiences, amplify their digital identity, and more. This is what JUKE is about.

Our VISION is to build a passionate web3-enabled community that is united by a shared love for film & TV. By leveraging our best-in-class partnership network and deep industry experience, we will work to deliver value to that community in ways never before possible.

The word community is thrown around a lot in the web3 space. However, vital to the legitimacy of any real community is whether or not its members have a voice in the underlying product they are organizing around. Digital marketplaces emerging over the past few years have often served two very different purposes: either a way for independent artists to sell their products and attribute secondary revenue to the resale of those products or a way for media companies to license their IP as a necessary evolution in the life cycle of their overall consumer products revenue. Whether the collectible is driven by promised utility or by speculators who hope the underlying value will increase over time, there have been very few legitimate communities emerging around these items as most marketplaces are not united by a shared passion for something other than the current or future value of the tokens themselves. 

Therefore, one of the reasons for the lack of legitimate community is the one-sided nature of most marketplaces. For a community to truly thrive, there needs to be a way for that community to meaningfully interact with the product, beyond just purchasing. Some of the best innovations in the web3 space have come from direct product feedback that allowed targeted implementation of features that users clamored for. Now, what if that extended not only to the tools that users could leverage to enhance their experience but were also fundamentally related to the collectibles themselves? We’re fully committed to building a community united by one common passion: the love of movies & TV. We live in an age where great content is more readily accessible and more consistently interacted with than ever, and we want to celebrate that love and reverence as much as possible. 

That is why we pledge to be one of the rare marketplaces that will not have a linear relationship with our community. We have worked very hard to solidify partnerships with some incredible films and TV shows. We take curation of these very seriously and stand by every drop we put our names behind. (We plan to announce these and more drops very soon. We can’t wait to share.) However, this is only the tip of the iceberg, and our vision for what JUKE can be allows for our community to turn to us and help shape what is to come. 

Below is a more detailed breakdown of the values we hold as a company. It was important for us to message these to our prospective early community members upon our launch as your initial participation will truly shape what’s to come. As an important aside, our DMs are ALWAYS open. If you’re passionate about film & TV, curious about web3, or a die-hard with a massive collection of Criterion Collection DVDs who wants to flex on us, please don’t hesitate to reach out. 

You’re one of us, and we’d like to build a community with you ☺ 

JUKE Values

A Commitment to Scarcity

  • Our Series 1 Collectibles will be created in limited supply. You will see edition counts that are designed to protect collectors as we believe creating a healthy marketplace economy is the first step before you can even contemplate increased supply or pricing. 

A Commitment to Messaging

  • It is vitally important to message to the community as much as possible, so you can make informed decisions. We will always be transparent about potential Rewards, Feature Announcements, and Gamification concepts. As well as, when users can expect these to a) occur and b) how they will impact the experience.
  • One thing we’ve learned in this new industry is that a user who sets out to complete a Challenge or seeks out a specific scarce collectible will be unhappy if they find out a similar collectible is created shortly after or if the supply of that collectible is significantly increased throughout the Series. We are actively aiming to announce full series plans around IP and scarcity-driven drops as early as possible to avoid these scenarios.

Every Frame Matters

  • We have attributed a simple point total to every Frame we mint. While this will not be the comprehensive metric by how our v1 scoring system will be calculated (more info on this soon), we felt it important to attribute value to every Frame that is easily verifiable on-chain and travels with the NFT itself. 
  • This also immediately signals to our early adopters that collecting high-value Frames will enhance their experience as the platform matures and rolls out more features.

Premium Collectibles, Then Utility

  • We love utility. It’s one of the things that makes this space so exciting. However, we believe the legitimacy of the collectible itself can be overlooked when it’s only used as one piece of a potential reward. 
  • It was important to us to partner with not only premium IP partners but also work with the best-in-class film artists and illustrators to create original works of art that stand alone as collector pieces. 
  • We are incredibly excited to bring the work of award-winning artists like Akiko Stehrenberger to our community. There will be more artists like her working to recreate some incredible films, pushing the boundaries of what a movie poster can be.

Accessibility

  • While scarcity will always be king, we believe fundamentally that NFTs should be accessible at their core. Especially as we set out to build a platform that not only appeals to fans’ interest in existing IP but also promotes the discovery of films and shows someone may not already be a fan of. 
  • General accessibility is key to onboarding new users, and this helps early adopters who own desired collectibles.

Community Engagement

  • One of the additional benefits of JUKE being a partner-agnostic platform is how we can allow our community to use their voice to advocate for certain products. 
  • We welcome suggestions and love the idea of adding certain scarcity-driven collectibles from a specific IP property if the community clamors for it.

Expressing Fandom

  • Owning a limited edition movie poster of your favorite film is cool, but it’s hard to express outside the confines of your home. Being able to easily display your digital assets, on social media, in digital picture frames, or in the form of physical items such as merchandise, is vital to the longevity of our community. 
  • We are excited for fans to be able to display their JUKE Frames on Instagram and are collaborating with partners like Infinite Objects to create physical versions of our collectibles. Still, this is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to all the valued possibilities of fan expression.

Building Bridges

  • Many of the tools needed to create a truly web3-enabled experience for film & TV fans are still to come. We’re committed to building toward the future of film and TV fandom and are eager to innovate alongside emerging use cases. More announcements to come on this soon. 

If you’d like to be added to our newsletter and request an invite to our closed beta, visit us at www.juke.io.

JUKE TEAM

TAGS
Interviews
Featured