Hendrik Hey and MILC: Shaping the Future of Europe’s Media Industry

Hendrik Hey was running one of Germany’s most successful media companies when he realized that the industry’s payment economics had a structural problem. 

Royalty statements arrive late, filled with deductions nobody can explain. Rights are split among intermediaries, each taking a cut. By the time revenue reaches the original creators, much of the value has already been lost along the licensing chain. Hey has spent more than a decade building infrastructure intended to address that gap.

The Man Behind the Infrastructure

Hey had built “Welt der Wunder” from scratch, launching it in 1996 as a science and technology program that would go on to become one of the most recognized media brands in German-speaking Europe. By the company’s own account, its production unit has produced more than a thousand hours of content for major broadcasters, and Hey eventually acquired national television stations in Germany and Switzerland. 

Those who have worked with Hey describe a personality that matches his ambitions: intense in style, relentless in execution, and deeply impatient with systems that fail to deliver on their promises. He is not the kind of founder who waits for industry consensus before making a move. When he became convinced that blockchain technology could solve the attribution and payment problems he had spent decades observing, he started experimenting more than ten years ago, long before most media executives could explain what Ethereum was or why it mattered.

By 2022, those experiments had become MILC (Media Industry Licensing Content). The company emerged from three decades of evidence that the existing systems would never fix themselves.

Why Previous Solutions Failed

The problem Hey set out to solve is older than the internet itself, though the internet made it considerably worse. Streaming platforms solved distribution, and anyone with a smartphone can now reach a global audience, but distribution was never the real bottleneck. The real problem was tracking who created what, who owned the rights, and who deserved to get paid.

The industry has spent decades cycling through proposed fixes, from organizations designed to pool rights and distribute payments fairly to automated tracking systems to centralized databases meant to create transparency, and each has failed because none addressed the core flaw, which is that ownership data does not travel with the content itself. Goldman Sachs research has estimated the creator economy at hundreds of billions of dollars in annual market value, yet much of the underlying payment infrastructure predates the modern internet.

Artificial intelligence is now multiplying the complexity faster than any legacy system can handle, as every AI-generated derivative, every adaptive music cue, and every piece of synthetic content creates new attribution questions that current infrastructure cannot answer.

MILC and the Infrastructure That Might Finally Work

MILC’s infrastructure is already live, processing transactions and distributing revenue through smart contracts that execute automatically whenever content is used.

Ownership information is encoded directly into the digital asset itself, meaning rights travel with the content and payments occur at the point of use. There are no quarterly statements filled with unexplained deductions and no intermediaries extracting percentages at every node in the chain. When a piece of content generates revenue anywhere in the system, the smart contracts handle distribution instantly and transparently.

“We are at a point where media is being rebuilt from the ground up,” says Hey. “My focus is on creating the infrastructure that connects creation, ownership, and monetization in real time, so Europe can lead in a system where value flows directly to the people who create it.”

Europe, and Luxembourg in particular, was a deliberate choice for this infrastructure. While U.S. regulators have taken a more fragmented approach to blockchain projects, European authorities have developed clearer frameworks for institutional capital, including GDPR for data protection and MiCAR for tokenized assets. For a founder with a long career in European media, building within that regulatory environment made practical sense.

MILC also serves as the first active compartment in the Digital Genesis Fund, a Luxembourg SICAV-RAIF launched earlier this year with reported assets of 55 million euros. The fund operates under Europe’s alternative investment framework for private equity and hedge funds. 6M serves as AIFM and fund advisor, with Q Securities S.A. as depositary, Ernst & Young as auditor, and DLA Piper handling legal structuring. Additional compartments are planned across energy technology, mobility, real-world assets, and AI infrastructure.

For Hey, this represents the culmination of a journey that started long before blockchain existed, a career spent inside systems that failed creators, and a determination to build something better. MILC is infrastructure designed to correct a structural failure that the media industry has tolerated for far too long, and the question now is whether the rest of the industry will adopt it before another generation of creators decides the system is no longer worth fighting for.