Connections

With the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, travel and congregations of people have been shut down and remote communication tools are on a tear. Will content distribution events become less important, and is this global health crisis the thing that breaks the already fragile back of the big film and television markets?

As a native cloud software company, the pandemic’s impact on Rightsline has been somewhat muted from an economic perspective, in that while we expect new project starts to slow, most of our staff and the majority of our customer base have been working remotely with our platform since inception.

Perhaps the biggest repercussion is on the staff from a personal level. Anyone who says that it’s business as usual is wrong, as my usual now includes eight straight hours of Zoom meetings wearing a dress shirt and pajama pants with a roaming 5-year old. That’s decidedly unusual. Now is the time to focus on the health of our people and the well-being of our culture, as that will undoubtedly transfer to economic success on the other side.

If there is a silver lining to this calamity, it’s the recognition of this moral imperative and the time to focus upon our people and our company, and not doing so would be to base action on fear rather than on future.

Resiliency and ability

Our biggest takeaway from this is the recognition of resiliency. Resiliency from our customers and prospects, and the fortitude of our own resources. For our staff, who I’ve had the privilege to work with throughout our rise, the level of adaptability to customer support and delivery has been inspiring to watch. We work day in and day out on configuration, code, project management, support and operations, and this change has been met with the same can-do attitude that we’ve embraced from the day we fired up our Amazon Web Services account.

For some of us, it’s also been an amazing opportunity to limit business travel and has given us a bump in old fashioned productivity.

It turns out you can get a ton accomplished in a day without commuting or overseas flights.

From our customers (both old and new), there has been consistent feedback about how crucial it is to have access to complete rights information from wherever they may be, and to crucial it is to have access to complete rights information from wherever they may be, and to continue content acquisition and sales activities without interruption.

While we’ve previously completed several global implementations where the majority of hours have been remote, we’re now kicking off new ones with project plans that respect the totality of distancing, and are a testament to the aforementioned resilience and subsequent adaptation. We will find a way!

Long-term impacts … and ideas

So what, if any, will be the long-term impact of the current crisis? For us, it’s proven our ability to execute at an incredibly high level on a remote basis. We’ve had some experience to draw upon, but nothing as complete as the isolation that will continue — at a minimum — during the early summer.

Going forward, leveraging this understanding will allow us to more appropriately weigh the relative importance of in-person meetings versus increased productivity, using data gathered during this time to support those decisions.

Additionally, it pushes the idea of the four-day work week up higher on the “let’s experiment with” list, as it becomes clear that the elimination of the normal commute in, office set up, catch-up with coworkers and commute out can more than make up for eight hours over four days. As long as the casualty isn’t our culture, this can and should be something to consider.

So what about the industry that we serve? We’re in the business of supporting deal-makers in the content lifecycle, and as such attend to and listen to their needs. Attendance has been dropping at the content markets, mostly driven by the bigger players building infrastructure and content pipes directly to consumers, but also driven by the collapse in traditional windows; who’s to say that TVOD isn’t the best first exploitation medium; and what is the definition of a TV window these days anyway?

Perhaps COVID-19 and social distancing will disrupt the handshake deal, not only because we’re explicitly prohibited from actually shaking hands in the near term, but because of the recognition of efficiencies gained through more precise information transfer during the sales cycle.

The proposition of online rights exchanges and sales tools have been extensively vetted and have yet to make any traction over the past two decades, mostly due to the nuances and complexities of deal terms, as well as the trust in the partnership between creators and distributors.

Challenges ahead

Failed attempts to automate deal flow over the past decade are a testament to the fact that relationships will always reign supreme.

Isn’t it feasible that both new content and library sales will be done over remote connections rather than over chilled rosé on the Croisette? It seems apparent that those connections can continue their evolution to support a 24/7 sales cycle that is powered through web-based rights management platforms that provide visibility into deep, complex libraries, and the relationships between parties can be handled in the most appropriate way whether that’s Zoom, phone calls or really awesome events around the world.

The key here is that they’re not co-exclusive and will never be.

Tools like Rightsline can provide a virtual information network of content positions, and remote working tools like Zoom can at the same time allow for one-on-one connections and relationship nurturing. Whatever the duration of the current crisis, our collective remote working abilities have just taken one giant step forward.

If we use all the right tools at our disposal, and don’t forget about the culture and people that make it all matter, we’ll emerge a stronger business and industry overall.

* By Rob Delf, CEO, Rightsline

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