Not all rights management software – or vendors – are equal. Some critical differences set FilmTrack apart from platforms offered by industry competitors. Primarily, the nature of the system itself—FilmTrack has a single, modular design—and the fact that finance is a core functionality.
Multiple Systems vs. a Single System
Managing contracts and financials with multiple systems that may or may not be integrated is an uphill battle. Media companies routinely miss out on profitable opportunities when their rights management system isn’t streamlined. Without a single source of information, it is incredibly challenging to reference VOD deals for multiple pieces of media around the world. For example, you might overlook licensing a film for two extra months in Europe simply because you don’t have up-to-date information at your fingertips.
Where competitor platforms typically offer limited or separate functionality, FilmTrack offers essential products for managing rights within one single system designed to streamline contracts, avails, and financial workflows. This is achieved through two powerful features:
- Contracts and Availabilities Manager – This feature puts contract data at your fingertips, providing immediate oversight into your avails to ensure you are not missing opportunities and are getting every dollar owed. The Contracts and Availabilities Manager delivers automated, real-time contract and avails data across your entire catalog.
- Financials Manager – This functionality presents industry-leading financial tools expertly designed to manage intricate calculations from circular deductions to financial waterfalls and royalties in/out.
A best-in-class rights management system houses all the relevant data within a media organization and serves as a single source of truth (SSOT), one official data set to work from. Managing one data set in terms of structure, format, and accuracy, instead of dealing with multiple silos of data across systems, is much simpler and more efficient.
A Modularized Solution—Not A Cobbled Solution
Another standout feature of FilmTrack's solution is its modular design. This approach significantly distinguishes it from the integrated systems provided by competitors, rather than integrating separate modules into one system, which often leads to compatibility issues, maintenance, and complex upgrade requirements.
The benefits of a modularized solution, as opposed to an integrated system, include:
- Seamless Operations: The modules work harmoniously on a unified platform, eliminating the need for complex integrations and compatibility management.
- Flexibility: It caters to all sizes of businesses by offering a pay-as-you-need model. Companies can customize their system by turning on or off modules as required.
- Easy Expansion: FilmTrack's solution facilitates adding new features, such as financials, with effortless activation and user training.
- Gradual Adoption: Companies can adopt different parts of the system at their own pace, starting with rights management before moving on to finance.
- Efficient Monetization: The system optimizes libraries, ensuring all available content is sold, and revenues maximized.
This innovative approach allows FilmTrack's solution to provide unparalleled flexibility, efficiency, and user-friendliness, redefining film rights management software standards.
Built-in Financials (or Lack Thereof)
Even if a rights management solution has a system for financials (although most on the market do not), many of them cannot process today's VOD, OTT, and globetrotting titles environment. Many media companies resort to spreadsheets because their rights management system simply cannot account for the complexities of digital distribution.
If you use spreadsheets or a similar workaround, you are left with distribution data separate from your financial data, requiring you to cross-reference those systems whenever you want to make a deal, opening the door to costly human error and lost revenue. To ensure full monetization of your library, you must eliminate manual processes in favor of a single source of truth.
FilmTrack’s Financials Manager offers robust granularity, helping you keep track of billing, receipts, currencies, exchange rates, and bank accounts. FilmTrack also has a built-in automated sub-ledger to ensure you can account for every aspect of your finances all in one place.
Financials Not Siloed From Rights Management
Very few competitors offer financials with their rights management solutions. Yet, even among those few vendors that do, it is typically through an entirely separate system, resulting in a different technology stack. Instead of purchasing two distinct solutions and then integrating them, FilmTrack's solution is a single platform. Customers can switch on the modules they wish to use, beginning with contracts and avails functionality and later activating the financials module or selecting to adopt the entire system at once.
In either scenario, FilmTrack is one seamless platform engineered to function as a cohesive solution.
Implementation
Effectively managing royalties and rights requires a holistic approach: efficient systems, accurate data management, transparent and timely processing, and healthy business relationships that support the rights and interests of everyone involved in the process.
Yet many rights management software companies rely on product experts (with limited expertise) to implement their products against standard out-of-the-box requirements. Without a formal process, they provide a system, engage another department to implement it, and fail to establish strong customer relationships, negatively impacting end-user adoption rates.
Conversely, FilmTrack's holistic approach targets three core objectives:
- A precise roadmap: FlimTrack's implementation team follows a host of experienced checklists and methodologies that foster and steer project progression.
- Full visibility: FilmTrack ensuring clarity on all project facets, curtailed to each client.
- True cost assessment: Encompassing more than just software cost, FilmTrack includes evaluation of time investment, implementation, staffing, and more.
Without such an all-encompassing approach outlining necessary practices and planned benefits, a media company could find itself in a failing implementation project that stretches over two to three years, leaving them to restart or revert to previously inadequate systems.
However, if the implementation team is intricately involved in scope definition, estimation, pricing, delivery, implementation, and support, a successful and profitable experience is ensured.
A Holistic Approach to Rights Management Implementation
From pre-sales engineering to customer support - a holistic approach to rights management implementation ensures widespread adoption and successful outcomes. To learn how this methodology helps organizations achieve business process transformation, download our new guide, Implementing Royalties and Rights Management Software.
FilmTrack is an RBC Company and subsidiary of City National Bank Member FDIC. City National Bank is a subsidiary of Royal Bank of Canada.
This article is for general information and education only. It is provided as a courtesy to the clients and friends of FilmTrack. FilmTrack does not warrant that it is accurate or complete. Opinions expressed and estimates or projections given are those of the authors or persons quoted as of the date of the article with no obligation to update or notify of inaccuracy or change. This article may not be reproduced, distributed or further published by any person without the written consent of FilmTrack. Please cite source when quoting.
