Exclusives

With the transition to digital for media and entertainment — home entertainment, TV broadcasting and even theatrical —multiple groups are all distributing the same content to sometimes the same customers, both domestic and international.

And knowing what rights you have for which content, what contracts you’ve made to monetize that content, and making sure all your internal silos are communicating (and doing so quickly) has become more important than ever before.

At the second annual Smart Content Summit, Theodore X. Garcia, EVP of customer relations and alliance management for intellectual property management software company FilmTrack, shared figures that show aggregate spending for intellectual property is valued at more than $4.2 trillion this year, and the value of that IP is valued at over $7 trillion.

“Those numbers tell you that it’s imperative that we get rights management, and contract management, and the silos that are put in place between TV and film and home entertainment, between legal and business affairs, between sales and operations, those have got to come down,” he said.

Steve Poehlein, director of media and entertainment for PricewaterhouseCoopers {PwC), said his firm has done studies that show that studios and other entertainment companies often use different rights systems in each silo, and while sometimes those systems talk to each other, sometimes they don’t. “You wonder how much they’re leaving on the table given that they really don’t have a holistic understanding of their rights,” Poehlein said.

Jason Kassin, co-founder and CEO of FilmTrack, said he believes the best way for internal silos to communicate is to have everything centralized in a single repository, and then offer different people different views of the system. Even if everyone’s looking at the same data, one client needs to see VOD in one way, while another needs SVOD in a different way, depending on the components of the content, and the financial aspects of transactions, he added.

“Rights is such a broad statement, covering the rights you exploit, the rights you ingest, and the rights left on the table for possible exploiting,” Kassin said. “Many of our clients look at rights along the value chain quite differently. What we’re seeing more and more is the combining of rights with metadata in such a way that [our clients’] buyers on the distribution side have a greater transparency, a visibility into rights as quickly as possible.” That could mean on a studio Web site having the ability to tie an avails report linked directly to their rights management system, so buyers in, say, Australia, looking for VOD properties can find them right away. “That’s putting your rights to work,” Kassin said.

He shared a story where one client was approached at a trade show with an inquiry about purchasing a lot of content, and, on the fly, “they were able to query their system, and pay for their entire trip to Cannes, because they sold a bunch of content to a provider.”

“That was something [the client] wasn’t selling, wasn’t pushing, and we see a lot of things like that not only on the demand side, but also the push side, where avails will show a bunch of content … that can be monetized,” Kassin said.

On the studio side, Nona Janssen Walls, ‎SVP of data analytics for information technology at Lionsgate, said it’s extremely important to have quick and easy communication about content rights between internal silos. Otherwise, you’re more than likely missing out on opportunities.

“You may own something outright but you already have commitments to pay TV or one of your SVOD services, so you need to make sure your systems can track that end to end, and process that information quickly, so you know what you have left, and how you can monetize it,” she said. A broadcaster may have a license to show something 10 times in six months, and after those six months their license expires. So if you’re in month six, and they’ve shown it six times, you can charge again, she said.

“That’s a piece of revenue that if you don’t have the right systems, you’re going to miss out on that accelerated expiration, or ability to at least contact that partner for additional fees,” she added.

The Feb. 4 Smart Content Summit, presented by the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA), brought together more than 300 top data, operations and research executives from TV, film and home entertainment. For previous coverage of the conference, click here, here, here and here.