M+E Connections

In what has become a borderless global content ecosystem, media and entertainment companies must be able to evaluate content and make impactful data-driven decisions, according to Whip Media.

The “travelability” of and success of content to new markets is what stands to accelerate deals and increase revenue. Fortunately, content buyers and sellers now have innovative tools to make connections that are more profitable than ever before.

Distributors can make more meaningful decisions on what content to invest in and localize if they have predictive insights on hundreds of thousands of titles at their fingertips, which is what Whip Media provides.

Data can help inform the decisions made by content buyers early in the process, especially during the licensing process, Dan Andrews, VP of sales engineering at Whip Media, said March 22 during the panel session “Transforming Content Licensing Through Data-Driven Localisation Decisions” at the sixth annual Content Workflow Management Forum.

The event was held in conjunction with the eighth annual Content Protection Summit Europe at the Cavendish Conference Centre in London and as a virtual event via the MESAverse, allowing for remote attendance worldwide.

Using Whip Media’s predictive performance data, companies can get a much better idea of where it “makes sense to localize content and what languages and what territories” they are looking to provide content for, Andrews explained.

This has come at the right time because “there’s a huge amount of demand for content now, so there’s been an explosion in the number of windows,” including an additional number of pay TV windows than there were in the past, he said, pointing specifically to advertising-based video on demand (AVOD), subscription video on demand (SVOD) and transactional video on demand (TVOD) as three significant examples. There has also been a “proliferation” of new platforms to deliver content to, he said, adding there is also “lots and lots of data.”

Andrews went on to tout the new Whip Media Exchange, a data-driven content planning hub and marketplace for film and TV licensing that launched commercially in March after launching in “beta about six to eight months ago,” he said.

The Exchange uses data to predict which TV and film titles will perform best on a specific platform and in a specific territory through Whip Media’s Demand Score, which allows buyers and sellers to make better informed choices, according to Andrews.

“This is an opportunity for people in localization or for distributors of content to really be thinking ahead” about what markets a particular piece of content stands to best be able to succeed in, he explained.

Additionally, thanks to the large “partner ecosystem” that Whip Media has, there is a network of localization and content delivery vendors that content buyers can turn to if they need subtitle or other localization services, according to Vicky Albon, partnership relationship manager at Whip Media.

Those partners “can help our clients and our buyers get over these hurdles,” she said.

And “one of the things that we’re really hoping to do is to expand our partner integrations in our platform,” she added.

To view the presentation, click here.

To download the presentation deck, click here.

The sixth annual Content Workflow Management Forum was produced by MESA in association with CDSA, the Hollywood IT Society (HITS), the Smart Content Council, the Content Localisation Council, and presented by Convergent Risks, with sponsorship by archTIS, NAGRA, Signiant, Whip Media, AppTek, BuyDRM, LinQ Media Group, OOONA, ZOO Digital, EIDR and Titles-On.

The eighth annual Content Protection Summit Europe was produced by MESA in association with the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA), and presented by Convergent Risks, with sponsorship by archTIS, NAGRA, Signiant, and BuyDRM.