FAST channels are changing the license revenue environment and providing new opportunities. With revenue forecast to grow at an incredible rate, media companies have new monetization options that didn’t exist just a few short years ago. However, these opportunities also create a much more complex ecosystem to accurately track and manage film rights in an increasingly fragmented and expansive marketplace.

License Revenue Management Challenges

For companies still using legacy tools for tracking, this complexity creates significant challenges and errors, resulting in missed opportunities or underpayment. Designers did not create these systems to handle the intricacies of multi-platform licensing across on-demand, streaming, and FAST channels — especially when incorporating global marketplaces. 

These challenges include:

• Complex Licensing and Royalties

When you have varying license terms and royalties across multiple platforms, regions, and content windows, you need flexibility to model complex contract formulas and cascading royalty payments. Intricate dependencies across titles and territories often make it difficult to track.

• Manual Agreement Compliance and Verification

Ensuring compliance with agreement terms is labor-intensive but crucial to verify accurate revenue recognition. You need a system to automate compliance checks and verify revenue accuracy, identifying any underpayments or compliance gaps.

• Data Silos

Licensing and royalty data often live in disconnected systems, spreadsheets, and other information silos across business units. An integrated view of agreements typically requires tedious manual consolidation. For a comprehensive view, you need a centralized repository with visibility across all agreements, titles, and financials.

• Non-standard, Incomplete, and Inaccurate Data

Each distribution partner may have their own format, reporting, and standards for the data they provide. Manually normalizing this data is another area that’s error prone, requiring rekeying information and making assumptions. Modern licensing solutions automatically ingest data in varying forms to reduce manual data management. Automated validation workflows can catch discrepancies and inconsistencies to ensure the underlying data is complete and accurate.

• Complex International Rights Management

Maximizing licensing revenue from worldwide rights requires optimizing detailed contractual options across regions, languages, and local market restrictions. Legacy tools lack the flexibility and analytical capabilities to fully exploit international rights. Configurable global licensing platforms provide visibility into rights status and restrictions across all territories.

Leveraging FAST Channel Opportunities

The bottom line is that leveraging new opportunities such as FAST channels requires adopting a modern contract and financial management system purpose-built for the entertainment industry that provides the tools you need to track and grow your revenue.

For overseeing financials, a rights management solution that can handle complex calculations and recognize revenue from multiple triggers ensures you receive accurate information, discover underpayments, and receive what you deserve.  

Some of the critical benefits of a powerful entertainment rights management solution include:

• Centralizing Content Rights Management

Centralizing license details and rights statuses enables your teams (sales, accounting, etc.) to evaluate opportunities by providing a single, organizational-wide source of truth regarding content rights and availability.

• Optimizing Content Valuation

Evaluating historical title performance, revenue, and costs with valuation models enables you to optimize content pricing and packaging through comprehensive analyses of contract terms.

• Automating Complex Calculations

Automating calculations for complex rights and tiered pricing models, as well as cascading royalty rules, streamlines the management of payouts and ensures accuracy in billing and invoicing.

• Ensuring Accurate Revenue Recognition

Are you getting paid accurately for everything you own? A study by MGI Research found that 42% of businesses suffer “revenue leakage". You need to identify all revenue triggers across multi-tiered agreements and platforms. A system built specifically to manage rights and royalties can automatically verify calculations and validate reported usage to ensure accurate payments.

• Streamlining Workflows

Streamlining workflows accelerates deal negotiation and management by ensuring compliance and providing readily accessible data, thereby facilitating more efficient content rights activation and oversight.

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.