A fragmented market
Audiences, delivery and distribution forms are more fragmented and global than ever, with viewers accessing content across multiple platforms, picking and mixing subscriptions and devices.
This results in an increasingly multifaceted multidimensional rights environment which is further aggravated by the dynamic M&A activity in the Media and Entertainment sector, where content assets from different businesses are now housed in various legacy systems and even across different geographies.
Slim margins and the high cost of content sales
The struggle to sell content assets is real and several interactions are often required to purchase a single asset.
Selling and buying content requires a team of Legal and Business Affairs staff, acquisitions and sales teams, but even more of a challenge is posed by the conditions of data. Data required for content transactions is often spread across multiple systems and held in legacy, analog or retired systems, making it complex to integrate and analyse. As a result, sales may be lost because proper data is in an unusable form.
Enabling the Vuulr Vision
Vuulr is a global content marketplace for film and TV rights, providing both majors and smaller agents and creators with a single portal to purchase or sell rights to content where prospective buyers can also access avails, screening rooms, offer and counteroffer tools, previews and reels. The platform offers two main options to content sellers: either access to a many-to-many, single, global marketplace; or the development of an ad hoc branded digital “store”.
"Vuulr has tens of thousands of titles listed, and an advanced search engine, so buyers can discover the content they need quickly and easily. As an online marketplace, Buyer and Seller can negotiate simply, on platform, and reach a deal in days not weeks. Vuulr covers all rights types, pricing models and territories." Explains Ian McKee, CEO of Vuulr.
“While Vuulr provides a simple, unique point of call for buyers and sellers internationally, users wanting to sell their rights to new territories or services will need to have complete and clean metadata and avails for their assets. This is where Fincons can step in with an experienced team and solution to extract, cleanse, enrich and correctly structure the data around your catalog.”
Ian McKee, CEO of Vuulr
Fast and frictionless with metadata cleansing and extraction
The information needed to ensure that content is located and easily purchased on the marketplace is often buried deep in legacy systems such as traditional rights management systems. There are often gaps in the information that has been manually input into such systems resulting in inconsistencies. Fincons Group has been a partner of choice for tier-1 media and entertainment businesses for years, and immediately realized that there was a need for a simpler and faster way to capture all the relevant metadata for the content owner’s assets to export them easily to Vuulr.
Instead of manually cleansing and inputting data in various different formats from different legacy systems, with Fincons’ system integration, content owners have access to simple, seamless mapping, cleansing and extraction of relevant rights metadata such as actor names, duration data, runs provided, episode numbers, associated fees, and all other useful data.
An automation boost for frictionless data extraction
In order to achieve even more automation to enable a more frictionless data extraction from content licensing contracts, Fincons has implemented a Natural Language Processing (NLP) based tool that helps to automatically extract any incomplete data from systems and documents allowing the user to decide whether to edit, accept or reject the whole or parts of the selection. The system can even read data from a screenshot or the photographs of a contract. The selected data goes on to populate the rights management system automatically, significantly accelerating time to market for assets and helping content owners broaden their reach into new territories over the Vuulr platform.
Taking content to market the easy way
Thanks to Vuulr, content owners are finally able to monetize their entire catalog and access incremental revenue streams from new territories while reducing the cost of sales. It is now possible to speed up the sales process without increasing head count and to support buyers in various time zones at scale to acquire first-party data to inform strategic decisions automatically.
Fincons Group is a key partner for the media industry and understands business pressures to monetize content and make their assets work for them in a changing and fragmented market. To offer businesses even more cost efficiency and transparency in their Vuulr journey Fincons Group provides the automated contract importer as a service with no hosting or tech required and on a pay-per-use basis.