when good video rights go wrong
TRANSCRIPT
When Good Video Rights Go Wrong By Julia Goodwin Your company has a contract for a video you’ve bought or sold. All the terms spelling out your rights are there in black and white. They’re good rights, too, and you were glad you got them. But then something goes wrong. It seems that over time the rights were somehow separated from the video they were first defining. Putting the two back together again after so many hands have touched the video and versioned it can be a daunting challenge. The good news is that it’s never too late to start putting the contract and the content back together again. In doing so, you protect the company and its content assets for now and the future. It’s a truism that there’s no such thing as a one-‐size-‐fits-‐all prescription for managing video rights in any organization. From the small production company to the large media conglomerate, “right-‐sizing” your video rights landscape and its health is a subjective question that depends on the needs of the organization, its workflows, its business focus. If all’s well, then a company’s video rights are tracked even as that video may change over time, it can share rights information when it needs to, it bills (or gets billed) properly for its distribution agreements, its content is protected, and it can let go of most of its rights anxiety. If you’re not sure how your company is doing, here are some warning signs that your video rights may have gone wrong:
1. Internal consumers of rights (especially salespeople and derivative product divisions) complain about the amount of time it takes for them to get rights information
2. Your external partners complain they don’t get paid on time 3. You’re not sure if the royalties checks you’re getting are accurate 4. You have shelves or boxes of older, still active material that you’ll get around to
cataloguing and monetizing some day 5. You’re not sure how far out into the world your content has gone…without your
knowledge or permission 6. You have multiple systems managing your video rights information
These are just a few of the most dramatic and painful symptoms of video rights gone wrong. With the proliferation of distribution channels for video and the monetary opportunities they bring, having a strong video rights ecosystem underlying your video content processes will ensure your company’s long-‐term success.
Companies invest heavily in systems and integrations to create or buy content, describe it, store it, sell it and send it out the door. Recently, it has become increasingly important to think carefully about the way video rights weave throughout those workflows, systems and integrations. The exercise of documenting the fabric of rights usage across the company will raise improvements for workflows and can inspire the adoption of innovative new systems that can optimize a company’s time to market by knowing what it can use and protecting its content from misuse. A company can have thousands of videos in its Digital Asset Management (DAM) system, but if it doesn’t know how it is allowed to use them or uses them incorrectly, what are these assets really worth? Earlier in 2015, we learned how videos and their rights could be a timeless asset. Thanks to a blog posted by the Baseball Hall of Fame, baseball aficionados were treated to a lost moment in our national pastime when video footage of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig from 1925 in the Fox Movietone archive at the University of South Carolina made headlines around the world. Actually, this clip had been in the university’s archive for many years and had even been previously licensed. Suddenly, sparked by the blog, this video lit up the media for days. It’s interesting to draw a parallel to a company’s video back catalog. Could a company glean its archives for such videos and related rights? Could licensing older content create new interest and income, supported by social media? It’s exciting to think about the creative ways a company might make its video rights go really right. Knowing the state of a company’s videos and the related rights are critical to its efficient and proactive video ecosystem. To learn more, see the Optimity Advisors Orange Paper on Video Rights at http://www.optimityadvisors.com/insights/latest-‐thinking/orange-‐papers/video-‐rights-‐maturity-‐model. Julia Goodwin is a Senior Manager within the Information Management practice at Optimity Advisors.