You may not have a crystal ball to see into the future. However, content rights management companies must know how to find hidden pockets of availability to maximize the value of their library and stay ahead of the competition.  

Unfortunately, many media companies still manage their rights on spreadsheets or isolated in-house databases, failing to see the value-add in using a central rights management platform that monitors and helps them manage their contracts. However, homemade systems and spreadsheets are challenged to calculate all the availabilities for a title in a given territory, language, media, channel, and period of time. 

So how can companies achieve the granularity required to fully monetize their libraries?

Managing Availabilities  

Contract management software with built-in contract and availabilities management helps you manage all aspects of your content library, so you can rest assured that you'll never miss another opportunity. These platforms give media companies the ability to:

• Optimize revenue while reducing risk

• Calculate complicated royalty payments

• Prevent over and under-reporting and payments

• Track other types of revenue and liability, including advances, guarantees, and fees

• Comply with contractual obligations involving dates and timelines

• Identify titles that will soon be available (and determine when they become available)

• Avoid selling what they don’t have the right to sell while selling everything available

What is missed when you can't see what's available?

It is virtually impossible to ensure you are exploiting all available permutations of your library without a system explicitly designed to track these rights and availabilities. If you have just 10 films that are available in 200 countries, 200 languages, 50 rights, and 50 channels, then you have 1 Billion license possibilities. If you are not utilizing a system today, tools like FilmTrack will almost certainly help you recognize an increase in revenue by maximizing exploitation of the library.

Why is Availability Reporting Important?

Although film rights are highly complex, tracking them can be remarkably simple – either you made it or bought it – and what is sold, restricted, or held back, is subtracted from what is available to sell, which equals the available IP. 

FilmTrack’s Contracts and Availabilities Manager covers all the complexities and serves them up in a concise user interface – not just a spreadsheet dump. 

Availability reporting allows you to easily check for conflicts or collisions with an automated view of contractual availability by territory, media/rights, channels/formats, and languages. Our "avails" reports include most aspects of every contract associated with any piece of content in a simple-to-use and configurable report that only shows what you want it to show. 

These and other features set us apart:

• Graphical. FilmTrack features an elegant interface and impressive imagery to present availabilities. Reporting is provided in a clean and readable PDF format (or spreadsheet if you choose) that can be taken directly to market, making it easier for your sales team to do what they do best – sell!

“FilmTrack empowers our sales force by allowing them to interface directly with the system and receive an immediate visual on what they have to sell."

- Steve Schoch, CEO
Miramax

• Hierarchical. With other solutions, you typically must pick what you see – the media or the right. FilmTrack reports show you the ins and outs, with various levels of reporting for different audiences, with restriction warnings if a title is only partially available.

• Versioning. Our system allows users to make minor tweaks to their content and change the rights to maximize their revenue while avoiding the risk of overlapping.

• Exclusivity. Licenses tell you whether a title is exclusive, and our conflict and availability engines will prevent you from selling an exclusive license twice.

• Flexibility. FilmTrack integrates smoothly and seamlessly into your current system. In addition, since the platform is entirely cloud-based, it can scale and adapt quickly to your business and the changing film rights landscape.

Our system not only increases revenue but also reduces legal risk. While most companies have a slush fund to prepare for litigation over monetizing titles, with FilmTrack, that fund no longer has to be a focus. Imagine a day when legal battles, penalties, and fees incurred from selling content you don’t have the right to sell is a thing of the past. Managing massive complexity is finally attainable through FilmTrack.

Staying Ahead of the Curve
See FilmTrack in action in our case study highlighting how avails reporting helped Imagicomm keep up with their growing entertainment library and better support their sales team. Learn why Imagicomm's Senior Digital Assets Specialist says: 

"FilmTrack gives us confidence that when an avails report is sent to a prospective partner, the calculation is up to date and accurate. There’s no second guessing. As long as we put our contracts in correctly, the avails report will come out correct every time.”  

Download the case study to learn more!