Advanced Television

MEDIAGENIX takes a supply-chain view on content rights management

April 13, 2021

Never have the challenges for content rights management been so complex. And never have they been so pivotal now that the media industry is generating an avalanche of content that needs to reach an increasingly fragmented audience, and this while the very concept of content is changing.

In the meantime, revenues are under pressure. Costs need to be reduced, efficiencies raised, and maximum value needs to be squeezed from every piece of quality content, repackaging it for different audiences, and purposes. As a result, the whole media industry is pivoting to a multiplatform strategy.

The only way ROI on content can be achieved in this context is by bringing the right content to the right audience at the right time through the right channels. This is in fact the kind of thing a supply chain does in any industry. And any smart supply chain today operates on real-time data as its single source of truth.

Pluggable into the supply chain

Supply chains in the media industry specifically require a single source of truth around content and rights. If the rights management system is plugged into the supply chain management platform and revolves around a single source of truth about rights, restrictions and obligations, then all departments — from Acquisition, Planning and Scheduling through to Sales and Finance — can work in perfect sync on real-time rights data. Together with ecosystem, contextual and consumer data, this rights data can connect the media strategy to the planning plane and ultimately to the execution of the supply chain, and then flow back again to influence the strategic plane, which impacts the planning plane and so on, as a flywheel of continuous improvement. This substantially increases overall efficiency but also return on content investment, thanks to a tighter grip on business models and strategic windowing.

Simplified workflows for task-based contributions

The key is to unlock the data. Across the content supply chain, a growing pile of consumer, contextual, ecosystem and rights data can be harvested, managed, and leveraged. One of the challenges as far as rights data is concerned is to capture the multifaceted complexity right from the start, and to shift that start further upstream. This can be done by enabling diverse parties to capture rights data very early into the process and enrich the data as the content proceeds through the supply chain. This implies facilitating diverse use cases for a growing user base, through web workflows that are simplified for task-based contributions. Think of platforms such as a content marketplace in the Cloud or applications such as a web app that supports the whole process of selling rights.

Augmented intelligence

Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing are playing a growing part in content & rights data enrichment (e.g. automated document uploads) and, eventually, in capturing the content intelligence.

BI tools and smart analyses can be applied to data to gain important insights. By distilling these insights into AI algorithms the intelligence of the human experts can be augmented, which further improves the decision-making process and the quality of rights, content and schedule management. To improve the decision-making process when scheduling, for instance, MEDIAGENIX is further developing a rights-based suite of augmented intelligence solutions, including rating predictions, scheduling recommendations, and automated off-peak scheduling. The more OTT channels are micro-segmented, the stronger automated scheduling will come into play. And the ultimate form of automated scheduling will be personalized channels, similar to Spotify playlists.

Multi-level rights verification

In the meantime, content is being repurposed and repackaged for use on diverse platforms, including social media. The notion of content is no longer limited to long-form content, as media companies are taking a more generic look at it. Short video or audio clips, texts, press articles, books, e-book, user-generated content, … it can all be valuable content. This underlines the need for flexible and extensible content data models and multi-level rights verification.

Closed-loop orchestration

MEDIAGENIX believes that the best way to offer clients their best-of-breed solution for rights management is to make it pluggable into the WHATS’ON platform for closed-loop orchestration of the end-to-end content supply chain. As this supply chain extends beyond the confines of the media company, the platform also allows third parties to plug in and interact in innovative ways.

The Cloud

The Cloud is a key element in this as it facilitates the central view and opens a natural way to make the central platform accessible from anywhere. The Cloud also supports globalization as it enables international companies to manage rights on both the global and the regional level. In combination with web technology, the Cloud provides portability and remote collaboration, for instance for entering rights data. Media companies are moving to the Cloud driven by the need for agility, flexibility, and elastic scalability. They are also increasingly convinced by the benefits of SaaS/ PaaS and OPEX. That is why MEDIAGENIX offers a flexible, hybrid framework that supports the client’s gradual adoption of cloud technologies and cloud deployment models.

The ultimate aim of it all is to enable media companies to navigate the changing media landscape, each in their own way, with strategic rights management as their trusted rudder. For more information read the MEDIAGENIX white paper on rights management.

Categories: Articles, CA/DRM