A challenging market outlook

The TV and Video industry is becoming increasingly competitive with spend on content constantly growing and players aggressively competing for market share. Premium content is expensive, while existing content is often under-utilized.

An ever-increasing appetite for more content coupled with shorter time windows, fewer exclusive agreements and smaller volume deals is leading to more content contracts that need to be processed, while there is increasing pressure to negotiate and close deals faster than ever.

On the one hand programmers seek to acquire content more quickly, on the other pressure on Legal and Business Affairs departments is mounting as they seek to manage the distribution rights for more and more content to be viewed across a range of different OTA and OTT channels.

Licensees need to capture these complex contracts systematically in their rights management system of choice, allowing inventory rights and avails to be queried and viewed and, most importantly, ensuring rights can be enforced. This manual interpretation of clauses, matching of content to existing content records and creation of new content is a time-consuming process that slows down an otherwise fast-paced and content-hungry marketplace.

AI in media and entertainment

Artificial intelligence (AI) has long been in use in the Media & Entertainment (M&E) industry. More recently, with machine learning (ML) becoming more accessible, developers are taking a backseat to data scientists. Particularly in content creation and distribution, main players are maximizing business performance by enhancing the consumer experience and entertainment value delivered.

Informing content purchasing and sales

Netflix uses one of the most sophisticated systems to predict viewer preference with an algorithm that kicks in as soon as users log in. It continues to collect data while the user scrolls through the recommendations and analyses “watching patterns”. These are fast-forwarding of scenes, pause timings, device type, and a lot more. In addition to this, users’ accounts are sorted according to their viewing pattern and the platform even bases new content acquisition decisions on this data.

Meanwhile, front of house, YouTube’s AI allows publishers to automatically generate closed captions for videos uploaded on the platform – not just in the original language but in up to thirty-five different languages, greatly expanding the audience reach. These are just some examples of how AI has been put to good use behind the scenes: improving workflow, automating QC, tagging and enriching metadata, creating highlights and generally making content work harder for Media and Entertainment businesses, well beyond predictive insights and personalized content curation. As the need for operational efficiency continues to grow, AI is being applied to contract data to help extract relevant metadata without overburdening Legal and Business Affairs teams.

Support for Legal and Business Affairs teams

Extracting legal terms & conditions, titles, dates and costs from a contract so they can be imported into rights management systems is not an easy task. One challenge is that agreements do not have a standard format so essential data may be on page one in one contract and one the last page in another.

Similarly, different terminology may be used between contracts. Just try asking for a definition of “Free TV” from different side of the Atlantic! The interpretation of legal clauses and new terminology can be challenging even for an experienced lawyer.

Fincons’ approach: Automatic Contract Import

Fincons’ experience in the media sector has led us to developing a solution called Automatic Contract Import, that uses ML tasks such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Named Entity Recognition (NER) to support businesses with these processes.

Solution analyses all the documents submitted and extracts key relevant metadata like licensor information, catalogue and relative rights clauses.

A simple UI allows business users to quickly review extracted information and, after an approval, submit to external legacy rights management system in the final format required. The tool can also be offered as part of the new end-to-end Rights Management solution, AllRights, developed especially for the contemporary media market by Fincons Group.

Multi-dimensional rights management functionalities to change the game

At its core, AllRights ensures that businesses are supported in supplier and partner management processes, throughout negotiation phases and in the management of contract information, with a highly configurable approval workflow for both rights in and rights out processes. This core bundle also includes the management of program inventories and any other entities, including metadata, multi-dimensional rights management functionalities including ancillary and elemental rights, as well as overall rights management availability calculation and analysis. 

Additional Smart features, such as the automatic contract import tool mentioned above, can be combined with further tools that include a recommendation engine highlighting sublicensing opportunities on the basis of contents’ popularity and client’s information.