How Moonbeem Works
Questions from creators, studios, platforms, and the diligent.
Moonbeem is the rights-clearance, attribution, and earnings infrastructure for fan-created distribution. Studios upload authorized source material. Fans clip and remix it inside Moonbeem's creator tools. Every export carries a content-native provenance marker that survives the jump to any platform (TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and beyond) so attribution, rights, and revenue splits stay intact wherever the clip travels. We're infrastructure, not a destination. The clips live where fans already are.
When a studio onboards a title to Moonbeem, they set the terms under which their content can be clipped, remixed, and redistributed: duration limits, attribution requirements, revenue splits, platform scope. Every derivation made inside Moonbeem's creator tools inherits those terms automatically. The fan doesn't negotiate rights. The studio doesn't review each clip. The clearance is baked into the export at the moment of creation.
Every authorized export carries a content-native provenance marker: a cryptographic link between the derivative clip and its authorized source. We use a combination of fabric-level signatures and public-post reconciliation (verified account claims plus automated content matching) to maintain the attribution chain even as clips travel across platforms Moonbeem doesn't control. This is the core technical innovation. Attribution that depends on a single platform cooperating is fragile. Attribution embedded in the content itself is durable.
For authorized derivations whose creators have claimed their social accounts on Moonbeem, we poll the public performance of each posted URL and aggregate it into the studio's and creator's dashboards. For unauthorized or unclaimed instances, we use content matching to identify derivatives of Moonbeem-authorized source material circulating in the wild, which studios can choose to claim, authorize retroactively, or address through takedowns.
Revenue splits are set by the studio at the title level. For example: "70% to creator, 20% to studio, 10% to Moonbeem on per-view ad/bounty revenue." Tracked reach is calculated monthly. Earnings are visible in every stakeholder's dashboard in real time. Payouts flow through standard payment rails, with on-chain settlement available for partners who prefer it. We're deliberately conservative on the payment layer. It's more important that the splits are transparent, auditable, and accurate than that they happen instantly.
Creator-economy tools are built to count views and pay creators. That's a feature, not a foundation. What Moonbeem adds underneath is rights-clearance and cryptographic attribution at the source, which means studios can actually participate (because their IP is protected), platforms can actually integrate (because the content is clean), and the entire economy can scale past the gray-area liability that caps every current fan-clip business. In short: creator-economy tools measure an unauthorized distribution channel. Moonbeem authorizes and measures it.
Yes. Our API is designed to serve both human creators and AI agents generating rights-cleared clips from the authorized catalog. Every agent-generated export carries the same provenance marker as a human-made one, which matters enormously as synthetic media proliferates and proof of authorized source becomes the differentiator between legitimate distribution and pollution.
Moonbeem is incubated by the Sundance Institute's Catalyst program. Official Adobe partnership. Founded by documentary filmmaker and entrepreneur Dan Sickles (Sundance Grand Jury Prize, DINA) and a team with deep roots in independent film distribution.
Free for creators. Studios and platforms engage under partnership tiers. Investors, that's what the Partner page is for.
The creator tools, authorized catalog, and reference implementation are live. The attribution layer is live in beta across our initial distributor partners. The earnings and splits layer is in active rollout as we expand from our first titles into the broader catalog. We're building this as production infrastructure, which means we'd rather get each layer right than ship every layer shallow.