Connections

Rightsline: Tackling Media Rights, Avails Challenges for Industry’s Biggest Players

With no end in sight to the content craze, the world’s top media producers and distributors are almost exclusively now outsourcing their rights and avails management to a purpose-built SaaS platform, so they can focus on their core competencies.

Even global tech giants like Google and Amazon have surrendered to the growing software complexities that can only be solved timely and economically through joint investment and mindshare. As a result, these forward-thinking companies are beginning to enjoy the benefits of sharing a common platform of exchange.

Rob Delf, CEO of Rightsline, spoke with the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) about the Rightsline ecosystem, recent achievements in the global avails space, and its future in machine learning.

MESA: It’s been a while, what’s new in the last year for Rightsline?

Delf: Rapid growth. A network effect is now driving customers to our door, essentially pre-sold. That’s 90% of our new business. We’ll get a call from someone saying we heard what you did for giant retailer X or for a huge network or what you are doing for the largest studio in the world. They see we’re doing business with same companies they are doing business with, which means they get immediate interoperability, through machine-to-machine communication. And that means they can eliminate all their “spreadsheet jockeys” and put them to better use elsewhere.

MESA: Can this business still be managed in spreadsheets?

Delf: No way. In just the last five years we’ve seen content catalogs grow from 200,000 to 500,000 to 700,000 titles, with customers now pushing a million and with no slowing in sight. Thankfully that kind of ballooning capacity is no issue for us. Rightsline is built to host the industry, so even as it’s becoming more complex by orders of magnitude, it’s also becoming easier to manage within our software.

What our customers are most surprised to see is that this whole realm of rights and avails is just not that difficult anymore. We can give them a login and a sandbox the day after they contact us, they can start playing around with it using their actual data, and then it grows naturally from there, until one day we have a few hundred new users onboarded.

MESA: That’s a lot of users just managing rights for one company.

Delf: That’s a good point; they’re not all just managing rights. Companies are now implementing Rightlsine organization-wide, in more and more divisions, to manage deals and contracts of every stripe – no longer just traditional rights licensing. At many large organizations, we are in four-plus divisions, and continuously growing from there. Most big customers are looking to add two or three divisions per year as far out as they plan. They are making Rightsline their core platform and building around us. They look at it and say, “It’s here, it works, it hooks to everything, it’s secure and SOC1/2 compliant. Done. Why build it?” So their cost of ownership goes through the floor instead of through the roof. Content avails has become a big growth horizon for us, too.

MESA: You mean studio content avails for video platforms distributors?

Delf: Yes, our Available platform has quickly become a huge part of our ecosystem, to where we are now running the operation 24/7. We launched it just over two years ago and already we have a million active avails, which will at least quadruple by the end of year. Techies can think of Available as a service layer transport that connects Rightsline to Rightsline, one company to another, while it also performs a lot of data cleansing. We are managing 300 plus publishers, over 115 countries, and more than a dozen languages. A couple large US retailers innovated the platform with us, and now other, influential and global partners have filled out the club. This is our year of going global with Available.

MESA: Rightsline seems to have risen from relative obscurity to industry leadership in the last five years. What drives that kind of rapid growth? It’s not so easy.

Delf: Innovation. But innovation really unpacks to a few key things, and we could not have achieved this rapid growth without all of them. For starters, we assembled the most talented brain trust in the industry. Then, we re-invest continuously to expand our products, releasing new features at the remarkable rate of every four weeks. And as complexity blossoms, we’re always working just as hard to refine and simplify the experience. This pace of iteration has made Rightsline mature beyond its years.

As much as anything, though, our excellence is driven by a continuous dialogue with all our customers. We’re very grateful for them. We listen to their anecdotal feedback, but we also collect systematized feedback through software like Jira and Zendesk and through pre-sprint and post-sprint conference calls. In a real sense, our products are being developed in the most disciplined way by the biggest and brightest media companies in the world. It’s a true collaboration, and that level of mindshare just naturally accelerates everything and drives excellence.

MESA: Can you give a specific example of how that process works?

Delf: Sure. At the moment we’re putting the final touches on our financial capabilities to allow for frictionless integration to ERP accounting systems. We’re now handling extended revenue recognition, amortization, allocations and such. Like everything we do, we’re working hand-in-hand with some of our biggest customers, but we’re also putting our preliminary designs and feature sets out for comment from our broader user base. The real-time, broad-based insight we get during development is invaluable to making a great product.