Smart Screen Exclusive

To paraphrase The Bard, let us not to the marriage of content and contract admit impediment. That sentiment is animating growing interest in workflows that can integrate media asset management with the management of rights and contracts in real time.

As mobile devices, over-the-top services and social media platforms spawn ever-more ways to consume video, the ability to deliver the appropriate — and appropriately licensed — content to the right device at the right time is increasingly critical to effective monetization. But at most traditional media organizations, content management and delivery are silo’d separately from content licensing and contractual terms of use.

Trying to coordinate between the two often causes delays, risks miscommunication and can lead ultimately to missing opportunities to monetize, especially on social media platforms where consumers’ attention is often fleeting.

“There’s been a real shift in the business, especially in sports, where all these people are using all these things immediately,” Christy King, COO of asset management services provider Levels Beyond, told Smart Content News.

“Say you’re Turner Sports, and you have a deal with the NBA where you’re supposed to be feeding footage to NBA.com for reuse” online and on social media platforms. “You need to know what footage you can deliver, for what use case at what time. If your creatives have to go to legal each time to check whether they can do something it just gets impossible.”

In an effort to address that problem, Levels Beyond struck a deal in June with Rightsline to integrate their respective asset management and rights management systems via API. The aim is to offer clients of both companies a cloud-based rights and asset management solution that allows users to be able to see and edit rights metadata, and execute automated or roll-based manual actions within either company’s interface.

“So if you’re Turner, and your deal with the NBA says you can use up to 5 minutes of footage from that day’s games in any programming you’re producing for that day, you could have a UI that would show anyone with an @turnersports login the content they can use at that time,” King said.

The integration of rights management and asset management is at the core of Film Track, co-founder and CEO Jason Kassin told Smart Content News.

“The marriage of content and contract is my religion. I’ve been preaching it for years,” he said. “It’s a big reason we started the company.”

Like King, Kassin said interest in automating rights management within asset management workflows is increasing. But Film Track champions the idea of housing it all in one ecosystem.

“It’s not just content and contracts, it’s also websites,” he said. “We have clients, like Vision Films, where you can run an avail search right on their website, because we manage all of it. It doesn’t make sense to have a CMS running your website, and then a separate system to manage your assets and so forth. They’re all pulling the same data, but they’re structuring it differently, or it needs to be keyed differently. It’s much more efficient to management them together. ”

And efficiency is key to monetization, Kassin said. “When you go out an acquire a new content library, that’s great, but you need to know, do I have music clearances in this territory, do I have the German-language dub and sub assets. Those are often the last things that get looked at when you make a library deal, but they’re what will determine how you can monetize it.”

Despite the growing interest in integrated workflows, both Kassin and King said old silos are often hard to knock down.

“Sometimes the biggest challenge is cultural,” Kassin said. “You have entrenched interests, legacy players, whose interests are aligned with the status quo. But there is a transition happening, where even the old guard is starting to see this as critical.”