M+E Daily

By Amos Biegun, Global Head of Rights and Royalties, Vistex Inc.

Remember the adage, “Content is king?” Now, we’re told, the consumer is king and those of us in the technology supply chain are all part of the machine that is expected to support content wherever, whenever, and however individuals want it. The new reality in the media and entertainment industry is about serving the individual; not groups of folks gathered around their televisions in their living rooms, which fit neatly into easily-defined demographics and watch mostly linear programming.

Today, content is specialized and individualized to match the unique interests and consumption preferences of disparate individual consumers. And, while legacy systems are in place to support the development and delivery of traditional content, rapid changes in production and consumption models have left companies scrambling to find ways to fortify the enterprise and withstand whatever is now coming their way.

The new terms of engagement

On the distribution side, new delivery methods have opened up a treasure trove of existing content to be reimagined, repackaged, and redelivered across plat-forms; while new content is being developed, distrib-uted, consumed and socialized in record time. To expedite this process at reduced cost, producers and distributors are consolidating to shrink the supply chain; while the studio system faces the disruptive threat of independent networks and channels with their fingers on the pulse of both millennials and Generation Z, who are invited to break through the proverbial fourth wall armed with up to four screens (smartphone, TV, laptop and tablet) of technology to appease their insatiable appetites.

So the terms of engagement with consumers have changed significantly, and the content is better targeted, but what haven’t changed for decades are the laws that govern how content is exploited as intellectual property.

Intellectual Property (IP) is still where the true value lies in the media and entertainment industry, [just ask director, writer, and producer James Cameron about the top grossing films of all time, Avatar and Titanic] and managing its associated rights efficiently so that it can be widely and legally leveraged is a challenge we’ve all seen test even the strongest IT infrastructures.

When rights are exploited, calculating royalty and participations payments can be equally taxing, especially as volumes of digital transactions continue to climb to unprecedented levels.

Consumer purchasing patterns drive the market

For over two decades, I’ve watched the industry – and the systems that support it – evolve. As the Global Head of Rights and Royalties for Vistex, Inc. (formerly Counterpoint Systems), I continue to marvel at the direction consumers have driven the market through their changing purchasing patterns. I’ve witnessed profound organizational changes within the companies we serve, as the lines separating previously distinct silos blur as content moves through the enterprise. The complex rights picture that now surrounds IP is being leveraged broadly across an organization to inform sales, operations and finance, and additionally feedback to content and strategy teams, all supported by robust and timely analytics of each product’s performance and potential earnings.

In short, better decisions are being made faster with systems that can evolve at the speed of consumer demand.

As mentioned previously, there is a visible scramble in the industry to respond appropriately to the current set of changes and challenges. While some in the industry are desperately trying to reconfigure their existing tools, force-fitting new concepts through old methods and processes to meet highly specific analytical and reporting needs, others are taking a more holistic and scalable approach to the business of producing and distributing content, by selecting technology partners and adopting solutions that evolve as they do.

One example is in the area of non-linear or non-traditional usage in TV content.

Those companies that kept faith with rights management systems based only on linear exploitation, in which channels, transmissions and runs are the primary variables of interest, are now counting the cost as VOD and sell-through add more complexity than these systems can handle.

Similarly, with so many new avenues for film content to reach global markets at lower cost, distribution companies need an avails solution that allows them to take advantage of these platforms today and into the future, rather than be tied to the outdated rights models of yesteryear.

More generally, a system that will survive the M&E industry’s changing winds needs to account for concepts that are fundamental to the business differently from those that shift more often. And that is why today’s consumer-centric media world is not such a steep change in the rights and royalties space: to the rights holder, content is still king.

The key object containing the rights is still the IP itself, and the vehicle through which rights are exchanged and participations in the content are set up is the contract.

The future calls for flexible fundamentals

When recently implementing our flagship Media Maestro solution at a major studio to manage the ingestion and calculations for their digital sales, we again learned that what rights holders of all kinds are looking for is a system that reflects these fundamental business truths, but is flexible enough to capture both nuances in the rights picture and the changing patterns of global consumption.

It should support new types of agreements and ways of interfacing with downstream and upstream partners, reflecting standards where appropriate but also supporting custom exchanges. It should also integrate fully and openly with scheduling, playout, asset management and other systems, on-premise and in the cloud, to allow business-critical data to flow seamlessly among them.

Through these and many other recent implementations, we’ve learned that the systematic management of rights that had traditionally been thought of as a “back office” function, has now moved front and center to make rights information (including their associated metadata) available to the enterprise in real time so that every department can react to the push of the button by the industry’s new royalty: the consumer.

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Amos Biegun is a 25-year veteran of the rights and royalties business. As CEO of Counterpoint Systems (acquired by Vistex in February 2014), he drove the company to extraordinary growth and spearheaded the organization’s expansion across the music, media and the brand licensing industries.