Taiwan’s longest-running traditional puppet television show is creating non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, to help bring their art form to a new modern audience and generate a fresh income stream. NFTs are crypto-assets representing a digital item such as an image, video, or even land in virtual worlds, that exist on the blockchain and carry unique digital signatures that cannot be reproduced. The prices of some have risen so fast last year that speculators around the world sometimes “flipped” them within days for a profit. Pili International Multimedia, which makes films with puppets at its studio in central Taiwan’s Yunlin County, says it wants to be a pioneer in using NFTs as another source of revenue. “The sort of imagination everyone nowadays has for the online world is developing so fast that we are almost unable to grasp it,” brand manager Seika Huang told Reuters. “Instead of sitting by the sidelines, the best approach is to jump straight in, to fully understand what’s going on. That is the fastest way to catch up.” Pili has thousands of glove puppet characters, a traditional part of Taiwanese street entertainment culture spinning colourful and highly-stylised stories of heroic courage and romance, often with martial arts. The puppets are painstakingly created and expertly manoeuvred during the filming of the shows, with costumes that are sewn on and strands of hair meticulously put in place. Pili said four of their puppet characters were made into digital versions and more than 30,000 of these have been sold as NFTs since their listing in early February. The company declined to reveal the profit-sharing with the market platform but said each NFT cost $40, translating to generated-revenue of at least $1.2 million. Marketing technology company VeVe, which is selling Pili’s NFTs on their platform, said the stories of the puppet heroes resonated with a younger crowd and can draw in foreign fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. “Pili is the same as Marvel in that its story structures are very complete, for example, they have a lot of heroes. On top of that, the western market actually really like our martial arts heroes, kung fu, and so on,” said brand manager Raymond Chou. Huang, who said their initial listings had sold out seconds after launching on VeVe, is now working on transforming up to 50 other puppet characters into NFTs in the next two years – potentially another million-dollar revenue stream for the studio. (Production: Ann Wang, Fabian Hamacher, Jacinta Goh, Travis Teo)
Source: Reuters