When 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’re glad you got them.  But then something goes wrong.  It seems that over time the rights were somehow separated from the video they were defining.  Putting the two back together again after so many hands have touched the video and its rights appears to be a daunting challenge.

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, it can share rights information when it needs to, it bills (or gets billed) properly for its distribution agreements, its assets are protected, and it can let go of most of its video 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:

Internal consumers of rights (especially salespeople and derivative product divisions) complain about the amount of time it takes for them to get rights information
Your external participants complain they don’t get paid on time
You’re not sure if the royalties checks you’re getting are accurate
You have boxes of material that you’ll get around to cataloguing and monetizing some day when you have extra budget
You’re not sure how far out into the world your content has gone…without your knowledge or permission
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 will ensure your company’s long-term success. 

Companies invest heavily in systems and integrations to create or buy content, describe it, store 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.  This exercise will raise improvements to workflows and can introduce 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, what are these assets really worth?

Earlier this year, we learned how videos and their rights can be a timeless asset, especially for nostalgia buffs.  Thanks to a blog posted by the Baseball Hall of Fame earlier this year, 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 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 is critical to a company’s efficient and proactive video ecosystem.  To learn more, see the Optimity Advisors Orange Paper on Video Rights 

 

Julia Goodwin is a Senior Manager within the Media & Entertainment practice at Optimity Advisors.